


The Stars We Left Unmapped

by Reginald_Magpie



Category: Original Work
Genre: Androids, Artificial Intelligence, Fictional Religion & Theology, Fictional politics, M/M, NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo 2016, Pilots, Robots, Science Fiction, Space Battles, Space Opera, Spaceships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-08-29 07:38:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 48,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8481121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reginald_Magpie/pseuds/Reginald_Magpie
Summary: Being a navigator on an interplanetary ship which regularly makes trips into unmapped space is a difficult task. It's one Virgo is not fully prepared for when he steps foot on the Star-Ling passenger ship which docks on his ocean-bound home planet. Meeting the crew is culture shock enough for the man who hasn't ever been off his own world, but the universe beyond Cavan is even more vast than Virgo ever imagined.When his ship is waylayed on a planet quickly going to ruin, the ex-aristocrat must decide where his allegiances lie on a brewing political rift surrounding robots and newly discovered non-human life, and the threat of ever-encroaching terraform failure on a declining number of survivable planets.





	1. Precarious

When a mid-sized planet in Sector B of the Astarum Collective, loses the woman who heads their council, they hold an event in her honor that lasts three days and four nights. It's less than a festival, more than a funeral, and lights up the street with bright berries plucked from the semi-aquatic bushes dotting the volcanic and reef shores on the mostly-ocean Cavan. Tourists from far across the galaxy come to see her body paraded up the volcano’s slope and into the active caldera. 

When her only son and heir learns of her death, he knows what's coming and disappears into the depths of Cavan's capital city's slums for days. He dyes his red hair black so he won't be recognized and tries to forget the way their house-almost-castle echoed empty when he got home the last time.

Viltir's slums are slung low against the ocean, streets and buildings protected by grimy, aging domes of sturdy glass hung like sagging ceilings or clusters of circus tents.  At the edge they drop off into the deeper portions of the reef surrounding the volcano that Viltir is built in the shadow of, bearing at the end of some slum streets views of deep oceans teeming with colorful life. 

Virgo does not stop to stare as the tide comes in above his head, but instead enters a small bar situated near the end of the street. He tries to avoid the gaze of the handful of men and women inside as he enters, cautious but trying to hide it behind a thin veneer of manufactured charisma.

He sits at a far table, punching his order into the console at the left of the booth that he tucks his short frame into, twisting his fingers between one another nervously between key presses. He tries not to worry about the festivities focused more toward the central upward slopes of Viltir's silent volcano. He can imagine the flowers and berries they're throwing into the center in memory, and he shudders. This land is feeling old. 

As he watches the waitress approach, he groans internally, drumming his fingers on the table. She's not supposed to be working today.

Echo has a broad face with shallow features and kind eyes, dark hair framing her face in thick curls which fall to her shoulders in cascading waves. Virgo knows her well. She’s been his friend as long as he can remember. And she’s going to ask how he’s doing. He really doesn’t want to talk about it.

It’s not that he’s sad, that stage of mourning has yet to come really. It’s just, he doesn’t want to think about the thousands of people who never knew his mother celebrating and commemorating her death. In one way, he feels she doesn’t deserve the respect, in another, it’s all a reminder of the looming responsibility which her death implicates. 

Virgo had plans to explore the galaxy, he was born and raised on Cavan, never straying from his waterbound planet’s surface and hardly seeing most of its shores, but he’s always had a love for maps of the star systems that neighbored his own. Astarum Navcards are easy to come by and the devices which read them are common, it wasn’t hard to find everything he’d ever wanted to know about the geography of his neighboring planets, those still alive and those whose terraforms failed decades ago. 

This is all too complicated to explain to Echo, it’s not something he can express properly in words, the disappointment and dissatisfaction and the lingering feeling of overhanging doom. He murmurs a few curses to himself as she approaches, and brushes his hair back from his face, letting the red light from the setting sun through the water wash over dark skin and darker freckles. 

“Knew it was you!” she says in a stage whisper as she approaches, sliding into the booth opposite Virgo.

“Yo.” Virgo nods at her as she hands him a tall glass of viscous violet alcohol and a small dish of similar violet juice containing the macerated berries both were made from. Virgo dumps the dish directly into the glass, stirring it slowly with a provided straw from the hollow flower stalks of the same bush.

“Are you okay?” Echo asks, and Virgo just shrugs, taking a long drink. 

“Maybe I shouldn’t be serving you on grounds of grief or something.” 

“Maybe,” Virgo murmurs between swigs, “Not drinking different than usual.” 

“That’s true.” 

“Why are you here?” 

“I work here,” Echo says, staring blankly at him.

“You’re not supposed to work today.” 

“I switched my schedule with Deneb,” she says with sudden comprehension, standing up again and straightening the semi-luminescent staff uniform apron.

“Why?” 

“For your instatement!”

Virgo sighs, shaking his head. This is what he was afraid of. He doesn’t want to think about taking on the weight of the entire council of Cavan. He doesn’t want to think of falling apart under the pressure like he does whenever things of too much weight are put on his shoulders.

“Yeah,” he says, “You should go back to work.” 

Echo gives him a concerned and suspicious glance. 

“Don’t tell me you’re planning on not showing.”

“I won’t tell you that, then,” Virgo says, not meeting her eyes. He downs almost half his glass, fingers of his free hand skimming across the table’s glossy finish.   

“You’re going to make things better here, Virgo. Please, you need to go. You need to take this seriously,” she pleads, ringing her hands and fixing him with desperate eyes.

Virgo just shakes his head. He runs his fingers through his red curls and  rests his forehead on the heel of his palm, a thin groan making it out of his lips.

Echo sighs after a few moments of silence. 

“Fine, okay, I need to get back to work, but we’re going to talk about this later, Virgo, you’re not getting out of this. This is too important.” 

Virgo frowns while she leaves, brows furrowed deep as he finishes his drink. He drops six coral sheks on the tabletop, and pushes himself up from the table. 

“Hope you don’t mind,” he murmurs to himself, left side of his mouth twisting downward. He disappears back into the busy street through the back door. 

The drink did little for his inhibition but it’s an excuse to make a direct push toward the starship docks built into the side of Viltir’s volcano. It’s hard to get across the city when it’s as packed as it is, even if the walk across the thinner stretch of the city between the ocean and the volcano should only take twenty minutes without traffic the amount of stops and turns necessary when so many citizens are out as those for this funeral celebration. 

Instead Virgo is caught navigating drifting clouds of interplanetary tourists from as far as the furthest reaches of the Crux-Carina Alliance here to see the unusual military custom festivals and the casting of the body into the semi-active volcanic mass looming over Viltir like a death threat. 

Virgo almost stops to gawk at the hundred different planets’ different fashion styles and faces wandering the streets in vast currents of varying skin tones and colors of fabric.Clouds of the thin dust off-sea-sand float through the air, and Virgo lifts the draping collar of his shirt to cover his mouth and nose while he ducks through the crowd, refraining from the urge to be caught up, to people watch and disappear within the crowd. 

Sometimes Virgo likes to be the center of attention, in quiet situations with a pair of eyes fixed only on him and the soft quiet presence of walls dampening the outside’s hold. But for the most part, despite a charismatic and oft-too-quick to speak attitude, he dislikes to be the sole person looked at. Despite this, the statistics are against him.

He hears the whisper and immediately knows it’s time to fade a little further into the backdrop, the two women discussing, is that her son?

He dives further into the crowd, disappearing behind the swells and pulling his face covering up a little further to hide the freckles dotting his skin all the way up his lower eyelids. He pushes Echo’s words from his mind, tries not to think about the looming threat of responsibilities, and he goes where he always goes where he wants to remember every detail of his life is as tiny as the sphere of ocean he’s spent his entire life on, in the scheme of things.

Virgo enters Viltir’s main starship port underground through a tunnel which leads through the base of the outer layer of volcanic rock leading up the sheer ocean-facing side of the volcano which fell into the ocean long before Cavan was terraformed, creating a cliff face accessible only by air or through the volcano. 

The lowest two levels (joined in the center but separated at the edges so the outer rim is  a second floor looking over the first), where the underground entrance are, are less a port and more a massive lounge dotted with restaurants and gift shops selling knick knacks made of coral or the berries harvested from Cavan’s famous native bushes. People from all over the galaxy are filtering in and out; it’s busier than usual here but people are quick to enter and quick to leave the port so the effect seems less somehow. 

Virgo takes an elevator to the level above the lowest two, the level where the few remaining F-Class non-lightspeed breaking vehicles dock and where employment advertisements are shown in the little bar mostly only longtime locals and starship crew members know is tucked into a hidden corner deeper in the volcanic halls by the level’s secondary restrooms. He’s honestly surprised to find it open. Fomalhaut Blackwreath, the man who owns and runs the little bar, is one of the men Virgo knows from childhood as his mother’s closest ring of political supporters. 

Blackwreath, however dressed in dark and mourning colors, is still tending bar as studiously as ever, and looks up on Virgo’s entry. None of the travellers or tourists here for Virgo’s mother’s death seem to coalesce here, it’s a forgotten point in time, dusty as the wine glasses hanging from the rickety wooden (wood flown in from off-world, expensive and sturdy) racks bolted into the ceiling. It’s an era time forgot. One far wall is full of cubbies stuffed with Navcards detailing every nearby Astarum territory, leasable, and the only seating is along either side of the long, u-shaped bar. 

Blackwreath himself is a short, rotund man of around fifty with thick half-moon spectacles and a wild mane of raven hair which falls in eddies around his shoulders. He has a kind face which has seen the weather of its age and shows it in deep creases around his mouth and brow.

“It’s good to see you, boy,” Blackwreath murmurs in the half-spoken tone that he uses when he’s tired or alone with someone. It feels almost as familiar as his mother’s voice to him; Blackwreath has been more a father to him than anyone else, despite Virgo not really knowing much about him substantially. He looks tired and sad today, the same way Virgo imagines he looks too. He gives Virgo a feeble echo of a smile, though. He doesn’t expect a greeting, he’s one of few who’s noticed the fear Virgo has of opening his mouth around other people and who makes efforts to fill the empty spaces Virgo leaves hanging in the air with things that convince him to try filling it himself next time. The efforts are kind, and appreciated, but largely ineffective beyond the way he’s learned to ask questions to make the answers easier in coming.

“Did you dye your hair for mourning?” 

“I don’t want everyone to ask me about her,” he says, matching Blackwreath’s volume so the small room feels even smaller padded by the quiet words.

Blackwreath nods. 

“No one recognizes you without the ginger, huh?” 

“Yeah, I guess not. Can I get a drink?” 

Blackwreath chuckles, shaking his head while he turns to dispense a thick glass of the same viscous berry alcohol that was common all across Cavan. Blackwreath, however, serves his own blend, mixed with a kind of grain alcohol as old as history Virgo’s never seen anywhere else. It burns his throat on the way down instead of being so sour it folds most unsuspecting tourists’ lips, and instead of a slow onset of fuzz around the edges, the effect is immediate, like reeling ether dissolving straight into Virgo’s stomach as soon as he takes the first drink of the tall glass.

Virgo suspects Blackwreath wasn’t born on Cavan, but he’s been here for at least the twenty years Virgo’s been alive, a little under eighteen revolutions of the little ocean planet around its dim red star. He’s been courting Virgo’s mother for as long as Virgo can remember, but that’s been about as successful as Blackwreath’s attempts to pull Virgo from a withdrawn social shell which revolves solely around his mother and his best friend from childhood. 

It seems Blackwreath spends most of his life trying to do things which aren’t strictly tenable things to be trying to do. Virgo finds the old man’s stubbornness endearing, and one of the reasons he’ll return frequently to this bar to spend long hours arguing ethics in a small empty room. 

Virgo takes another drink of his berry alcohol, letting his gaze wander over the Navcards. They’re Starship-Guild compliant and brightly colored blue with a specific mineral to show it. He’s spent hours pouring over them. Most of them are more familiar than the floorplan of his mother’s Keep high up on the volcano. 

“What do navigators do on starships anyway?” he asks, voice tapering in from silence with a tentative crack.

“Lots of things,” Blackwreath says, his hands now deep in a bucket of fermenting berries kept under the bar on the side across from Virgo, “In the simplest terms they read the Nav and translate it to the commands of their ship. Each one’s a little different. Takes some real amount of practice to get the hang of a new one.” 

“You’ve been off-world haven’t you? Didn’t you take a vacation on Delessa a few revs back?” 

“Ah, yes, to see the Tsceezi Observatory.” Blackwreath passes a small dish of the half-fermented berries across the counter and Virgo tips it into his glass. 

“Why do you do that? Those are for eating,” Blackwreath says with mock-annoyance.Virgo just shrugs, stirring  the drink with his pinky before sucking it clean.

“Have you ever been part of a starship crew?” 

Blackwreath draws his eyebrows up, something between shock and concern. 

“I’ve got a bad feeling there’s a reason you’re asking this now of all times,” he says, carefully picking his words and letting his hand fall to the counter with a measured quiet, “But you know I won’t keep things from you when you ask, boy.” He sighs. Breaks eye contact. The luminescent filaments set into the bar flicker a little while a ship pulls into a place parallel with the bar somewhere far across the port. Virgo looks distantly at the Navs again. He doesn’t say anything.

“I started keeping those when I was a navigator on the Astarum fleet’s Magnolia-3,” Blackwreath says after a long moment of dusty silence between them, “traveled most of the known galaxy on that ship, joined up when I was fourteen.” A misty smile crosses his face, something like a bittersweet manifestation of nostalgia.

“I thought Astarum took seventeen and up,” Virgo interjects before finishing his drink.

“They do, joined early,” Blackwreath says, a private chuckle burbling from his lips, “Said I had experience navigating a family cruiser. I didn’t. They took me anyway, though, wasn’t hard to fake I knew what I was doing since no one seems to think reading Navs and givin’ the pilot an idea what they’re up against are valuable enough skills to learn. Most navigators get assigned a whole lotta stuff that’s unique to the ship. I spent a lot of my time in Maggie’s belly getting all the terraforming technology to behave correctly when we had antigravity problems in the hull. And trying to fix antigravity problems in the hull. Lotsa navigators are fill-in technicians like that.”

Blackwreath looks at him with an unreadable expression for a long moment, but Virgo knows he’s going to say something so he waits. Blackwreath turns away to re-sort a few glasses in their racks while he talks. 

“You’d be good at it. I’ve seen you pulling things apart and putting them back together at your mother’s. And you can read Navs, which isn’t easy. You’ve got the brain for it. But I can’t endorse it.”

Virgo nods. He looks at his hands, fingers knitted around the clear glass which is reflecting the glow from the bar inside, against the ice cubes, a thousand pieces of cold luminescence fractured between his palms. He thinks about the cold air in the Council Hall and the way his mother disappeared after her instatement. He tries not to, and instead nods a little more vigorously, looking up at Blackwreath as he turns again. 

“Knowing that you do not endorse this, do you have any job advertisements today?” he asks, with a subtle and wavering thing between excitement and terror in his voice. He tries not to think about the deep vastness of space or the trillion things that could go wrong with starships, and instead of the way his thoughts settle into calm little patterns while he delves into the three dimensional star maps stored on Navs. He takes a deep breath, drums his fingers on the bar.

“You look impatient when you do that,” Blackwreath says without answering the question as he bends to pull a glass pane with the edges embossed in multicolor wires and cloth grips from the space under the countertop. He taps the screen to life and slides it over. 

Across the screen a hundred tiny stars jump to life in a line at the left as bullet points for more positions than Virgo has ever seen on the board before. 

“There are a lot,” he says. 

“Lots of ships on Cavan right now. Lots of tourists. Try lookin’ just at the navigators, there’ll be less,” Blackwreath says, he’s still keeping his tone neutral. Trying to display he doesn’t agree with this plan while Virgo’s tapping over to filter into “navigator” positions. 

This narrows the search by a wide margin. Where the first glimpse was a galaxy full of calls for pilots and first mates, for captains, and for everything from chefs to medics to heavy-laborers, Virgo finds only a cluster of three tiny astral bullet points for navigator roles. 

“Oh.”

“It’s a dying art. Not a lot of care for maps or looking where you’re going when the entire galaxy’s been at war this long, you haven’t seen a lot outside Cavan, but it’s not a pretty world. Most people would rather fly blind than spend the coins on another person aboard.” While Blackwreath switches topics, it seems that he finds a better place to talk without seeming like he’s directly supporting the action.

Virgo looks down at the three ships listed seeking navigators.

The first is an A-Class Allegran Combat, marked as privately owned, named Loophole, a crew of almost a hundred on a massive ship. A note at the far margin mentions it will be fighting for the Astarum on the G-Norma border. Return date is marked as 

Second, a C-Class Sagi-Planetary Cargo owned by a local import company, a twenty-man operation on a ship Virgo would probably recognize if he saw it. It’s named “Another Box”, and is marked as “mostly within the solar system.” That seems far too local, and the note at the end reads in bold capitals “experience necessary.” 

The last is something Virgo’s rare to see; a D-Class vessel. Where A-Class, B-Class, and D-Class vessels are classed based on technological prowess and power behind it, D-Class vessels are something of a declassification of the other three, a tiny ship in which two or more necessary functioning parts have stopped being produced by the original manufacturer.

This one is a Star-Ling model Passenger named “Precarious”, a crew of five with a return date “unknown”. It has only “bring your own navcards” in the notes section and under contact information gives a docking number. After the docking number, there is a small glyph of a bird missing one wing.

“Ever been on a Star-Ling Passenger?” Virgo asks, tearing his gaze from the screen. Blackwreath raises his eyebrows. 

“Never even heard of one. New ship?” 

“I don’t think so, it’s listed as D-Class,” Virgo says. Blackwreath scowls hard, staring him down.  

“I won’t support you disappearing right now, but I sure as hell won’t support you going and getting yourself killed right now, you know how rickety D-class junk is?” Virgo watches his mouth twist uncomfortably downward.

“It can’t be that bad if the Guild lets it fly.” 

“It is that bad, give me that.” Blackwreath pulls the board out of Virgo’s hands, brows casting a shadow dark into his eyes. There’s a long moment of tense quiet. The air feels like syrup.

“What would you take as fair trade for all the navcards I’d need to leave?” Virgo asks, finally, quietly and level like he’s afraid of breaking the balance in the silence. Something flickers across Blackwreath’s face and is quickly hidden.

“Your mother’s keep,” he says, a half-joking curl to the corner of his lips.

“Done,” Virgo says, “I’ll have the deed to you by morning. Wait up for me.”

And with that, he downs his drink and tosses a few coral sheks onto the table. He takes the surprised silence and wide eyes fixed on him as cue to go, so he does. 

 

The level where D-Class starships dock in the volcanic port is little more than a large exposed cement platform, like a mushroom growing from the vertical face of a tree, attached to the side of the mount. At the far edge, a long stretch from the mountainside entrance to the landing pad, it drops off over the ocean. By the time Virgo gets to the port, the sun has set and the stars shine faintly over deep blue skies. Two small twin moons have risen, their light reflected in the water pulling high tide over the slums thousands of feet down and to the side.Only the higher grounded city where aristocrats and politicians have built houses on the slopes of the volcano is left above the ocean, half the city sitting underneath feet of obscuring water.

There are only two ships docked on the D-Class level of the port, one at each end of the long strip. One is dark, no lights on and seemingly no one there.

The other, though, is well lit with a few people flitting in and out of it, packing small boxes into it. It’s shaped like a robust almond, a pointed nose tipped toward the sky to show the back of it better than the belly. The core thruster at the back is folded inward while within atmosphere to protect the delicate technology at the candlestick-base shaped end of the ship. On each side, there’s something vaguely like a wing, or a backwards pointing fin large enough to hold a room inside, and above the wings more space build into the side of the almond. On top, a raised portion gives into a clear dome revealing the control area below the dome.

A very tall middle aged woman with dark hair pulled into a loose bun and a loose leather vest which hangs heavy from the small brass rivets set every few centimeters watches with seeming disapproval but says nothing as the three people loading the few boxes left into the vessel slow at Virgo’s approach.

At the front of them, a man a little taller and a little broader in the shoulders than Virgo with a tired face which gives him away as in his older twenties, deep blue hair which probably could stand up in a mohawk if not left to hang around his cheekbone to one side of his face, and a grin tucked above dark facial hair left to grow a little too long and below an arrange of scars across his left cheek. Behind him is a shorter girl, thin. She has a prosthetic arm visible underneath her tank top, and a patch decorated with a crescent moon over her left eye, peaking out from under long wavy blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. A few strands curl around her face and into her field of vision. She has the marks of an Astarum medic tattooed onto her wrist below the mass of unrelated artwork across the rest of her skin.

The last of them is an impossibly tall and impossibly broad man of at least fifty, with well-tended greying facial hair and grey cascades down his shoulders. He has weathered hands and deep creases in the smile lines around his eyes. This man is the first to speak.

“Hey there,” he calls in a friendly accent Virgo has never heard before. Virgo swallows hard, trying to fend off the feeling of his throat closing down and his brain shutting off as he thinks about what any of them might dislike about him over the coming months. His hands twist nervously on his large shoulder bag. 

“Hello,” he says, reaching a point where he can see inside the ramp up to the cargo hold of the ship where it’s spilling bright yellow light across the cement. Their shadows stretch against it and dim a little as the lights kick down into a resting mode. 

“You wouldn’t happen to be the navigator we’ve been looking for, would you?” the gray-haired man asks. Virgo gestures to the bag, and pulls a Navcard out of it, turning the blue piece over in his fingers before holding it up. 

“Are you the captain?” he asks, trying not to let the nerves touch his voice. The man laughs, a deep, hearty laugh.

“No, no, I cook,” he says, “The name’s Dane. But I’ve been hounding Liana, our captain, to get us a navigator for this ship for ages. It’s a personal interest.” He gestures to the tall woman watching them, who has fixed Virgo with something very similar to disdain. The man with blue hair matches the disdain, looking up and down Virgo with something akin to disgust. He turns around without a word and disappears back into the hull of the ship with his box.

“Uh, hi, good to meet you,” Virgo says, trying not to watch the man leave. 

“Scope’s got issues with thinking he’s bein replaced, don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Now, what’s your name?” 

“Virgo,” he says, he drops his last name, and it’s a common enough name here. It won’t mean anything to them. Dane nods, extending a big hand with the palm facing outward, a jovial smile falling evenly on his lips.

“Good to meet you too, Virg.” Virgo’s nose crinkles subconsciously at the nickname. 

“Thanks,” he says, though.

“Liana, you want me to take the freshie inside n ask him some questions or do you want to do it?” Dane calls back to the tall woman, while the medic looks up from the last of her boxes, trying to seem surreptitious about looking at him. Virgo watches her eyes skate over the modest draping clothes Cavan is known for, the dark and deeply freckled skin across his cheeks and arms and shoulders. He flinches but she doesn’t look with the same displeasure the other two did, just a curiosity born of legitimately not knowing. Virgo suspects she’s new to the planet. Which means it’s unlikely they’ll come back.

As Dane leads him onto the ship after Liana gives the go-ahead, Virgo tries not to think about all of the things that could go wrong and he tries not to think of never seeing Cavan again, never seeing the ocean he put down his roots in, never seeing the coral he spent his entire life swimming through again. 

It’s a daunting idea, one that distracts him from better surveying the cargo bay but that can be pushed away from his mind at least for the moment by the times he’s scaling the stairs at the opposite end of the hold, and being led up into the main section of the starship. 

They enter upward into a kitchen-dining area fit to serve a dozen people, it doesn’t look unlike a lower-income person’s kitchen in Cavan, if only a little bigger and with a special dishwasher. 

From there, Virgo is led down the hall along an open med bay set to one side and a large dusty lounge area to the other, and into a much smaller lounge area with a limited assortment of couches and deep armchairs, and a projection screen on one wall. This one feels much more used, and the sign on the door says “Crew Only”. 

Dane gestures Virgo to sit down.

“So, kiddo, you ever been off-world or are you fledge as a flight simulator?” 

“Excuse me?” Virgo asks, brows knitting as he settles into an armchair, nesting his bag between his knees. 

“You got experience?” Dane says, chuckling, “The way you talk says no. But if that bag’s half full of Navcards like I think, that says yes. Interesting little paradox you are.”

“I’m not, I don’t have experience, I mean,” Virgo says, he tries not to get anxious about Dane paying that amount of attention to him. 

Dane nods, “Which means you probably don’t even know what a Star-Ling is, huh?” 

Virgo shakes his head, “No sir.” 

Dane’s fingers knit into themselves as he settles opposite of Virgo. 

“We’re passenger transport, technically, but Star-Lings are built to do almost anything, that means we’ve got guns, cargo space, survey equipment, terraform technology compatibility and the prettiest navdome on any D-Class this side of the CCA.” 

“Navdome?” Virgo asks. 

“That thing on top of the ship? It’s got a walkway around the inside, and a platform above the control area on one side where you can use your Navcards and plot directions. We’re outfitted for mapping, too.”

“You mean to say you have the equipment to make star maps,” Virgo says, flatly, staring directly at Dane. 

“It’s what the navdome’s for,” Dane says, with a chuckle and a shrug, “None of us can make it work but that doesn’t mean a fresh set of eyes and someone who’s actually dealt with star maps and Navcards before wouldn’t be able to.” 

Virgo snorts. 

“Starmappers have to be huge,” he says, “and that technology’s limited by the Starship Guild.” Anxiety starts rising in his chest. 

“How illegal is this ship?” he asks, feeling his throat tightening. 

“Perfectly legal. We’re grandfathered in.” 

Virgo looks at him, incredulous, trying to find the lie where the corner of Dane’s mouth twitches but finding only his own brand of excitement instead. 

“You seem like an okay kid, and between you and me it looks a lot like you’re just trying to get off this raindrop, so I’m going to go ahead and say you’re welcome to join us. We can only pay you room n board right now, but we’re looking at bigger jobs as we get closer to the galactic bar this season, so if those go well you’ll get a cut. Liana’s our captain, you listen to her. If she’s not around,” Dane stands as he’s speaking, offering a hand to help Virgo up, which he accepts, “Then answer to Scope, blue hair pissy guy you saw earlier, he’s your pilot and you’ll have to try to get along with him. Which isn’t real easy, I don’t envy you.” 

“You’ll do most of your work in the navdome, and get that room there,” Dane pauses to gesture to the center of four doors in the wall that breaks to open into the hall, “Cliptic, our medic, will probably be by to explain whatever you want about the ship, and she’ll take you to the med bay to give you some vaccines and that kind of thing since your body’s used to here. We’re taking off in a little under an hour, so if you forgot anything, now’s the time.” 

Virgo looks distantly into his bag. Mostly it’s Navcards and clothing, a few pieces of gold jewelry, and dried berry beads to be woven into the hair. His mother’s remaining liquidated financial assets, Virgo split evenly between a glass bottle at the bottom of this bag and Echo’s pockets. Or rather, her sock drawer because Virgo felt she would probably notice if he shoved money into her pockets and be a little insulted. But it wasn’t like most of it was going to go to any use anyway. The bottle clinks away with a hundred and fifty gold sheks. Wrapped around it, a comm watch and a pair of headphones almost a hundred years out of date. Beyond that, he has some paperwork; documentation and a letter of certification for the cards from Blackwreath, and a book which details the known settled planets as of a rev ago. There isn’t much more Virgo can think of carrying with him. There were things he felt attached to at home; a bedspread decorated with luminescent patterns of the Proxima star system Cavan is situated inside, photos of him and his mother, a portable music player which streamed concerts from across the galaxy, other comforts afforded to Cavan’s rich and elite, but none of those comforts feel fitting while boarding a ship at least half a century out of date.

The anxious part of him that says life will never be the same and he’s making a mistake he’s not fully prepared for consequences of is quieted by the fear of staying, because staying would be different too.

For twenty years, Virgo has wandered the streets of Cavan as a free man, no responsibility and less challenge. He’s used to life coming easy. And he’s aware that a position at the head of his planet’s council would change that. If he can slip through the cracks, he will. Maybe it will at least be easier to navigate stars than a quickly collapsing political landscape which wants nothing more than independence from the Astarum which holds it in a vice grip for rich sea resources. Virgo hopes so at least.


	2. Message to Pilot

By the time Virgo has settled into his room, takeoff is imminent and his nerves are growing. The room is small, with a bed built into one corner. It’s in almost the exact center of the ship, eliminating the possibility for the same bullseye windows that the room directly next to his has. This is something Virgo is thankful for. He has a feeling he’ll retreat here when he realizes just how big and dangerous space is. He’s trying not to think of the panic welling in his chest while he thinks about being inside of something so vast and empty.

He jumps when there’s a knock, and Cliptic, the medic’s, softly accented voice echoes through the door. 

“Dane says we’re taking off slow to show you what orbit looks like, if you want you should come see the command room, Virgo,” she says through the door. Her voice is comforting, but the thought still sends an explosion of anxiety through his chest, leaving anxious debris to collect between his ribs and in his throat. 

He’s been sitting on the bed for the last half hour just staring at the dark grey metal interior walls, turning a Navcard detailing Cavan’s stars and its neighboring planets over and over in his hand, feeling the rough edge at one end of the cartridge scrape against the heel of his hand. He’s been convincing himself not to be scared. It’s only kind of working.

He unfolds his legs and pushes himself up from the bed, picking the bag full now of only Navcards up and slinging it across his shoulder before slipping the local card inside an outer pocket.Cliptic smiles at him through cherry-blossom-pink lip gloss when he opens the door and her visible eye lights up at seeing him. 

“Hello! Are you feeling alright after all of those injections?” she asks, iambic tone lilting as she turns away, “I am unfortunately very busy working on scientific survey most days, but if you should need anything at all or be the slightest bit stuck with the snuffle, please come see me in the med-bay. Please keep me informed on how you are feeling and thinking, it is my job to keep you healthy now.” She winks at him over her shoulder.

“So please do not do anything to make yourself unhealthy or I will have a very hard job.”

“I think you can handle it, you seem like a smart young lady,” Virgo says, softly chuckling, nerves showing. Cliptic is about to respond but she notices the nervous tilt in his voice and instead gently reaches a hand out to slip along his shoulder blade, thumb rubbing comforting circles. Virgo flinches in surprise and she withdraws her hand, casting an apologetic glance.

The stairs up to the control room are situated in the crew lounge, tucked into a corner by the hallway to the kitchen, with a thin metal railing lining them all the way up. The control room is rectangular with a triangular point on each short end, the forward facing triangular point is rounded down and home to a wide U-shaped control panel around a single chair situated in a track in the ground allowing it to glide around the panel. Above the control panel, the wall opens up into a viewing panel like the windshield of an on-world hovercraft. 

More controls whir along the long far wall, and are accompanied by a ladder up to the circular walkway around the navdome suspended above their heads, and the backward-facing platform situated at the front end.Toward the back, four deep armchairs are bolted into the ground around a metal circular coffee table which is strewn with newspapers from around Cavan and a few neighboring planets.  

Scope sits in the chair at the U-shaped control center, reclined with his feet up on the small ledge above the controls and using a toothpick to clean his nails. The scars along his cheek are ghostly blue against the controls’ glow. 

Liana is nowhere to be seen, but Dane’s sitting in one of the deep armchairs, and smiles when Virgo enters. 

“Here he is!” he exclaims, getting up to pat Virgo heartily on the shoulder, “Ready for your first trip into the outside, fledge?” Virgo flinches and frowns, but nods.

“He’s nervous,” Scope says without looking up. He pulls his feet down and flips a few switches directly in front of him. Precarious lurches forward so the viewing panel above the controls is no longer pointed at the dark sky above them. The nose of the ship now points out toward the horizon, where the deep blue water meets the deep blue sky like lips parting where the dual orbiting moons Virgo has known his entire life begin to set. Below the nose, a thousand foot drop to dark and jagged rocks, porous and bubbling with sea foam against volcanic cliffs. Virgo blanches as it feels like the bottom of his feet drop out from underneath him as he steps up to the control panel to look. He swallows hard, casting his eyes up to the star.

“See?” Scope says, half mocking, then spins his chair around to look at Cliptic.

“Do I really have to do a slow ascent? It’s boring.”

“Not for someone who’s never seen their planet from orbit, it’s not,” she returns, sternly, and even though Scope probably has a decade on her, and definitely has rank, he sighs, turning around and pulling a lever slowly. A monitor set in the control showing the cargo hold door depicts it slowly closing. 

“You sure you wanna do this, fledge?” Scope asks, still not looking at Virgo directly. 

Virgo swallows harder, throat drying with every passing second. He nods, unable to find the words to affirm that he wants to throw his life into the ocean and disappear over the horizon more than anything else in the entire world right now. He’d give anything to be anyone braver than himself now.

Scope doesn’t give any warning as he flips a switch to pull up the aircraft’s legs and he hits the accelerator like it’s an afterthought. So much for slow, Virgo thinks as Precarious jumps forward, and takes off across the cresting waves which begin falling away as soon as they’re out from the volcano. 

As the ship climbs, the planet under them shrinks and Viltir’s brightly lit core is outlined against darkness as the tide goes out and the slums begin to be revealed again. The further up, the more small island city constellations of street lights are visible against the ocean, and at the far edge of the planet, the little red sun is beginning to send light fracturing across the giant waves typical near Deltir. 

Precarious hits turbulence as they start to escape Cavan’s atmosphere, and it feels almost like they slow down but the world underneath them continues to shrink at the same rate. The jarring commotion sends Virgo’s stomach turning. 

He takes a deep breath as the ship makes a wide curve around the planet, bringing its red star into view in the distance, and showing the place where the light hits atmosphere. 

It feels like he’s been in the shallows his entire life, and he just swam off the dropoff. There’s a chasm a mile deep underneath him and a current pulling him away from home. The speed increases again as the ship hits the smoother air outside of the atmosphere, and Scope makes a full loop before pointing himself back toward the outer reaches of Cavan’s solar system. Suddenly Cavan has disappeared underneath them, and behind, and the moons are disappearing behind them too, and Virgo realizes he didn’t even really say goodbye to anyone but they’re speeding past the rocky twins lying just past Cavan’s orbit. 

Virgo is suddenly acutely aware of the fact that all of the eyes in the room except Scope’s are on him. 

“Been awhile since I seen someone look as scared as you,” Dane says, something comforting curling around the teasing tone in his voice. 

“Are you feeling quite alright?” Cliptic asks, coming over to him, “Would you like to sit down?” 

Scope groans, tossing a look over his shoulder at his medic. 

“Stop babying him, he’s a crewman. Don’t care if he’s fledge. Show him where he’ll be working and get him to work alright?” he says as he’s looking back at his controls, Virgo can see the corner of a frown at his lips.

“Sorry,” Virgo murmurs, twisting the strap of his bag back and forth between his fingers before quickly following a now-scowling Cliptic across the room to the ladder up. 

“I’m just trying to do mine,” she responds, quiet enough that Scope can’t hear her but Virgo can. She gestures up the ladder, and follows him up after he starts his ascent.

The walk has just enough room for a person as short as Virgo to stand, but he has to duck his head a little until he’s at the front end, where a larger platform hangs out over the control room a bit further, affording more standing room. The entire top is clear, giving a view of what seems like the entire galaxy of stars out beyond them.  In its center, the platform houses one of the rarest pieces of technology in the galaxy, right next to terraformers.

In the center of the platform is a small dome on top of a metal pillar with a dozen inserts and two dozen dials, buttons, and levers along its length. The dome itself is translucent dark blue, with a thousand inactive light filament dots peppering its surface, but what’s underneath it is the rare thing, a dual projector-mapper Virgo recognizes from antique catalogues. Last he heard the last one of these still existing was sold on a faraway planet a few revs ago. This one looks like it’s been part of this ship for half a century at least.There is dust collecting on the inside of the blue dome, and a key stuck in one side of the base, but it looks like it will at least read Navcards, and do what non-certified vehicles shouldn’t be able to do; modify them and fill blank ones.

Virgo approaches the piece of equipment with breathless excitement. He runs his fingers over the grooves where the dome meets the base, crouches to examine the slots where Navcards can be inserted, it also seems to be connected to the ship’s main controls, if the panel of directional controls give any indication. There’s an override button, but it seems like the commands are mostly to relay information to the pilot rather than take directional command of the ship. It’s outdated technology, but that means Virgo has an idea of the simple semblance of its parts. And it’s beautiful. It’s the prettiest thing Virgo’s seen in the navigational field. The gunmetal base is decorated with gold painted constellations and suns, beautiful trajectories from a planet Virgo doesn’t recognize. 

“Think you can get it to work?” Cliptic asks after giving him a moment of silence to examine the piece of technology.

Virgo feels his fingers tingle as he nods a jumpy nod, pulling the local card from his bag and slipping it into the highest of the three main card slots. He rummages in his bag for the next in the sequence, covering larger areas from top to bottom. He slots the next two underneath the topmost Nav and suddenly the dome jumps to life, full of a projection larger than Virgo’s ever seen in person, hundreds of stars and tiny solar systems around them filling the navigation dome.  Cliptic makes a surprised noise between a gasp and an “oh”. 

“Well I’ll be fucked,” Virgo can hear in Dane’s voice from below, as the man crosses to where he can see better from underneath. 

“I think it works,” Virgo says, with a nervous light laugh. 

“I’d say so,” Dane says, beginning the ascent to the navdome walk. He puts a hand on his hip, running the other through his hair as he half-crouches to fit under the navdome ceiling. Suddenly neither of them are looking at Virgo, they’re just looking at the map in blues and purples and reds depicting the open space that stretches out beyond them seemingly forever. Probably, practically forever.

Virgo bites his lip, taking a deep breath, locating the ship’s tiny tracking dot in the mess and pointing to it with still-shaking hands. 

“That’s us. I need to uh. I need to know where we’re going.” 

Dane laughs, and looks at Cliptic.

“Now that you mention I don’t think I have a clue where we’re headed next. Where’s our cargo going, Clip?” 

Cliptic shrugs. 

“The only thing that Liana said to me was that we are not coming back to close to the Cacophony for a long time.”

Virgo bites his lip hard. The Cacophony, the place where Sectors B, C, and D meet and the interstellar market explodes into life, a cosmic bazaar full of trade planets and space stations teaming with activity. Cavan lays on the very outer edge of the region. 

“Hey, Scope, where the fuck’re we going?” Dane calls down, to which there’s a long moment of silence, and then,

“Uh, Pasmore, first off,” an uncertain voice calls back. Virgo takes a deep breath. Thank god he’s at least heard of that one. It occurs to him now he should have brought his guidebook up from his room. It’s a planet across the Cacophony and firmly in Crux-Carina Alliance’s territory. He finds it with little difficulty within the map, and selects its name on the panel which folds out of the base with a short creak. A hundred different trajectories immediately springing into the fray of stars and planets, Virgo takes a long moment just to examine them. He uses the panel to sort through them. He notices as his fingers brush it, another small pop-out at the bottom of the first panel, and presses it. A keyboard slowly unfolds underneath the screen, and a new portion at the bottom of the panel now reads “message to pilot” and “message to captain’s quarters”. 

As Virgo is about to press “message to pilot”, Cliptic clears her throat. 

“I think you have got the hang of things now, Virgo, I will leave you, I have work to do. I believe you do as well, Dane,” she says.

Dane seems to have to physically tear his eyes from the map displayed in the open space of the dome, but sighs. 

“Ah yeah, maybe y’can get the navigation working enough to get autopilot on long enough Scope can actually eat dinner with us tonight without worryin’ we’re gonna crash into somethin while he’s not at the helm,” he chuckles, giving Virgo’s shoulder a tap with his fist, and then making a “lead the way” motion at Cliptic toward the ladder. As they descend, Virgo returns to his panel, gently pushing “message to captain” and typing in, ‘Safe, or fast?’ before sending it. 

He can hear a faint ping somewhere directly underneath him, and a quiet cursing in surprise. 

After a few long moments of clattering and rummaging, he gets a return message. ‘Fast. Don’t do that again without warning. I can hear you up there. Just talk.’ 

“Sorry,” Virgo says, quietly, aloud. There’s a sigh underneath him and then. 

“It’s fine.” 

In the long moment of silence, Virgo decides he should probably be doing his job and selects a route from his list. He selects both ‘send to’ options and two small lights branch off from the center console, one making a quick line toward the control room below, the other shooting off to the side along the ship and out of sight. Virgo laughs. He hasn’t seen message path lights like that since he was a kid, they went out of style when people realized they didn’t want people knowing every time they got a message from someone else in the house (or ship.) Even if it is neat to look at.  

There’s some more movement under the platform, and then a very soft, “wow.” 

Virgo can’t help but climb down the ladder to see what Scope is looking at. Across the main monitor of the ship’s controls, the route is plotted on a flattened starmap not unlike the one floating within the massive glass dome above them. Scope touches the points one by one to bring up details about the turns to make and looks up at Virgo with less harshness than he’s shown all night. It’s still not a friendly look, but it’s less hostile. 

“Thanks,” is the only thing he says. Virgo nods. 

“I should go back up there and make sure the automatic pathfinder isn’t going to send us into an asteroid or something.” 

“Good. Figure that out by the time Dane’s got dinner ready and I might let you stay when we get to Pasmore.” 

Virgo laughs a soft laugh. 

“The way I see it, that’s the captain’s job to decide.”

“You’d be surprised, fledge. Hey, wait here a minute actually.” Scope leans back in his chair, facing away from Virgo again. They sit (and stand, in Virgo’s case) in silence watching stars painstakingly slowly move along the field of vision, and something in the room feels a little more comfortable than a few moments ago. 

“Are you reasonably certain we won’t hit anything for the next ly or so?” Scope finally breaks the silence.

“Yeah,” Virgo says. Scope gives him a suspicious glance out of the side of his eye before looking forward again.

“I’m going to check anyway.” His hands start moving across the controls, running a sweep for asteroids. 

“Don’t know why you asked then.” Scope just shrugs, and, getting a green light on the dashboard of the console at the center, he swings his chair around the u to one side of the panel entirely devoted to a complex circular array of controls. Virgo’s eyes can’t follow his fingers and when Scope notices him watching he snorts.

“Watch the sky, not me,” he says, something softly teasing about it. It’s the most friendly tone he’s used yet. Virgo casts his eyes to the sky and he’s surprised when a pair of dark, dark glasses are thrust into his hands. 

“Put those on. You’ll get used to it eventually. But for now,” Scope mutters, and Virgo immediately follows directions as the ship starts gaining speed faster than it has since it started. The stars start moving faster along the field of vision and Virgo can practically feel the tension building. Scope picks up a comm microphone on the far side of the circular array and presses one of the buttons beside it.

“Hey, Clip, check the lounge. Readying FTL.” 

A few seconds of static later, the soft voice returns, “Already did. Go ahead.” 

Just as Virgo’s about to ask why the lounge needs checking, Scope smirks a tiny smirk and presses his palm down on a button at the bottom of the circle. The ship lurches forward and keeps climbing speed, with another lurch the light of the stars around them explodes and everything outside the window is pure white. Virgo’s throat catches on a sound of wonder as the control room is bathed in light. 

“Welcome to cosmic background radiation,” Scope says, quietly, “It’ll go away once we get going a little faster and the reversion core starts up. We’ll be able to see stars and stuff again in a couple minutes.”

Virgo just nods, wordlessly, turning before taking off his glasses and looking at his skin, usually too dark to seemingly shine in light reflecting it like it itself could glow, everything in the room is the same. 

“Yeah,” Scope says, fondly, as he turns to see the look of wonder on Virgo’s face. Virgo turns to him and beams, holding his hand up to examine it in the light. 

“This is what people make religions out of,”  he continues. Virgo nods distantly as the light starts to fade and the stars flying past them come into view against a lighter background than before they were travelling this fast. 

He can see why.

“That’s the end of the pretty part, you can go now,” Scope says, dismissive tone back to his voice. 

“Oh, uh, right.” Virgo makes a small jump back into reality. He swings himself up the ladder with a little more confidence and sets about more manually checking their course. The astronavigator, as the projector-mapping machine in the center of the navdome’s platform and its less advanced often not-map capable Navcard-reader cousins, are often called, overlays Navcards with the ship’s current fetched locations, and with whatever other information the ship can gather about the universe around it.

The act of checking the course consists mostly of “pulling” the projection into reach over the platform, zooming, and manually assuring that nothing the ship or the Navcards can detect will obstruct the plotted directions. After checking about a quarter of their journey to Pasmore, four hours or so of travelling at the speed they’re at now, a small message reads out on the panel of the astronavigator, ‘full autopilot unlocked - please plot again within three hours’. Virgo climbs down his ladder to stand behind Scope’s chair again. 

“Three hours autopilot at least. I can do more, if you want.” 

Scope laughs a single breathy laugh which makes his shoulders jump, he doesn’t turn to Virgo. 

“More than I’ve had in awhile. Let’s go see if Dane needs help,” he says, heaving himself up from the chair. He gestures Virgo down the hall. 

 

Precarious’ dining room table would seat about ten people comfortably, and is built into the far wall of the kitchen, half of it forming a booth in the side of the ship, the other half overhanging to more proper table proportions. 

Dane’s wide form takes up most of the small kitchen, divided from the rest of the room by an island painted with a pattern of triangles and circles that Virgo doesn’t recognize as being anything other than decorative. He looks up when they enter.

“You made it work!” he says. Scope’s lips subtly twist into something vaguely like the whisper of a smile. 

“He did,” he says, and Virgo nods. 

“Can we help?” 

Dane laughs, gesturing at the pot of berries sitting on the foldout cooktop.

“You probably know more about how to make these taste like food than I do, picked these devil seeds up on your planet,” he says. Virgo snorts, crossing to the pot.

“Good luck if you’re not used to them,” he says, peering down into it, “Best bet is to burn them if you’re trying to make an edible sauce for foreigners.”

“Foreigners! We’re the foreigners now!” Dane jokingly exclaims to Scope. Scope just sighs. 

“Just call me when you’re done,” he says. 

“Go, go,” Dane encourages, and Scope disappears back down the hall. 

“Burn ‘em, you say?” Dane asks.

 

Dinner is finished with little fuss, and Virgo watches Dane send one plate of berry-sauce-drenched protein block through a delivery system at the back of the counter before he uses his intercom to tell the crew that dinner’s ready.  

It only takes a few moments for Cliptic, Scope, and two unfamiliar people to appear from the depth of the ship. Cliptic is tying her hair back again after it’s been loose, and Scope smells faintly of tobacco smoke, which Virgo recognizes but isn’t intimately familiar with due to its scarcity on Cavan. The first of the new faces is a man of average build with light brown hair that falls to his elbows in a cascade of curls, with a precise, practiced application of makeup, and dark clothes. The second is much shorter, a man who looks young but could be as old as thirty, with a soft face and raven hair cut close around his ears. He’s missing two fingers on his left hand, and slouches his shoulders forward deep enough to cast shadow over his chest. 

The long haired man says nothing, but is introduced by Cliptic as Jackson, a passenger until they get to Pasmore, and the short man says a lot but seemingly nothing of substance, all in a very high and airy voice which makes it easy for Virgo to forget what the beginning of the sentence was by the end. He tries to listen, though, as he’s introduced as Devon, the ship’s “researcher”, which Virgo’s never heard of ships having outside of scientific vehicles. Virgo has never met someone who talks so freely about everything, from the growing political tension between the CCA and the Astarum to the bitter taste of the berries’ juice.

“Where are you all from?” Virgo asks, during a lull in conversation, the first real thing he’s contributed to conservation since utensils began clinking on plates in the small kitchen. Jackson looks up at him with impossibly blue eyes that say he’s going to continue to say nothing, but Devon jumps on the question rather quickly. 

“I’m from Pasmore, actually! This is like homecoming but way way shittier haha,” he says, and before Virgo can ask what Pasmore is like, Dane cuts in.

“Allegi B, personally, but I didn’t spend long there, I’ve been on starships my whole life.” Virgo doesn’t recognize that one, though the A/B/C naming scheme in planetary systems seems to be a largely Crux-Carina Alliance convention. One can only assume. Which means Dane is the first definitely-CCA-born citizen Virgo’s ever met who hasn’t been actively trying to kill his family. It’s kind of surreal. In the moment, he doesn’t feel any slight twinge of animosity for this fact, but at home he would have been happy to talk loudly about how all CCA-born citizens are scum. He doesn’t think on that too hard.

Cliptic chimes in with agreement, setting her fork down in the few remnants of juices left in the dish. 

“I am from Kitani but I was not there for very long. I was sent to the Astarum Medical Academy when I was thirteen, that is on New Basin within Sector A, and then I went to fight in the war.”

“You didn’t fight,” Scope says, he’s kept almost as quiet as Virgo has. His tired brown eyes are rooted firmly on his plate, face fixed in a decisive scowl.

Cliptic looks to him with measured displeasure, picking her words carefully.

“I healed wounds on the battlefield, I saw as much combat as you did, Walter.” 

Scope scoffs, shoulders jumping with a half-laugh, he turns to her with something like amusement and something a little more like anger on his face.

“You tell me that when you’ve been held prisoner of war, when you’ve been dropped into the middle of a war zone with no goddamn chance out, you tell me that when the fucking Astarum comes knocking on your door every damn year telling you to get a new address or you gotta go back and do it all again, you tell me you’ve seen as much as I’ve seen when you’ve seen people you care about killed in front of you.” He’s almost-yelling by the time he’s done, and Virgo casts a nervous glance to Dane, who gives him a wide eyed, minute shrug. 

“I have,” Cliptic says, softly. She folds her hands in her lap as she stands, “I did my best to heal the wounded who came to me no matter how gruesome. I lost an eye and an arm for that war.” 

“A great fucking good job you did healing everyone, too,” Scope begins, “You let h--” he stops himself there, starting again with something else, “And we’ve all lost limbs for that damn war, you were just too coward to let your own damn body regrow ‘em.” 

Virgo watches Cliptic’s jaw tense. Her knuckles connect with the side of Scope’s face before any of them expect it, and in the ensuing stunned silence she makes an exit down the hall, with short, apologetic nods to Virgo, Dane, and Jackson in turn. Scope rubs his cheek, looking after her as though he’s surprised and offended. Devon looks between the place where Cliptic was sitting and the one where Scope still is, confused.

“Don’t be an asshole and you won’t get hit,” Dane offers. Virgo just looks down at his empty plate. 

“Anyone want seconds?” Dane asks after none of them say anything. The silence continues. 

“Going to go get some rest,” Jackson finally says, the first thing he’s said all night. He has a deeper voice than Virgo would expect. Soft. It reminds him a little of Blackwreath’s. Virgo wonders idly away from the situation if Blackwreath looked like Jackson when he was in his early twenties.

“That’s… a good idea,” Devon says, similarly seemingly speechless for the first time all night.

“I’ll be in the navdome,” Virgo says, quietly, moving his dish to the counter before quickly making his exit.

An hour later, he can hear movement down beneath the navdome platform. The pilot’s chair creaks a little when Scope’s weight lowers into it, and he can hear it on its track as Scope slides over to check their trajectory. Virgo feels like he should say something, but doesn’t know what, and when he finishes manually checking their path to Pasmore, he slinks away down back into the belly of the ship trying not to catch Scope’s eyes. 

He goes to bed around the time Dane’s gotten up to start on breakfast, and lies in bed awake for at least an hour, trying to make his brain stop running on everything that could go wrong and everything that’s different and how he’s stepped into something entirely different than ever before and after the episode at dinner he’s not entirely sure he wants to be here. It takes a long time to get to sleep. 


	3. A Whale Killed In Viltir

Virgo is back on Cavan in his dream, sitting out on a coral outcropping still wet with the surf and thick with the smell of low tide. His bare feet are cut against the sharp coral, and the beads around his neck hang like heavy weights, bouncing against his chest as he leans forward to look at the glimmering tale of a massive whale disappearing under the waves. 

He remembers the tales about how whales knew the same songs the stars sing that were passed between Cavani sailors, stories about universes in their bellies and whales that knew the history of the stars better than any human astronomer. 

The whale’s voice sounds like his mother, back when she was young and married to a rich man but still an opera singer by her own right. He steps out further on the outcropping to hear her as she sinks under the waves, and falls, the ocean closing in around him. Only some tiny part of him is scared, the rest is distant, stuck floating in the endless waves. Virgo starts awake at the sound of beeping.

Next to his bed is a small comm box, which is blinking red in the darkened room. He clumsily rolls over and presses the button. 

“Uh, hello? Is everything okay?” 

“Do you mind coming and speaking to me?” Liana’s voice reaches through the cracking static. Virgo’s heart jumps into his throat and he nearly chokes on his answer.

“Uh, yes, of course, uh, where?” 

“The control room will do.” 

The blinking stops and the static clicks into quiet. Virgo sighs, anxiety bubbling in his throat and his fingers trembling as he gets up and pulls on fresh clothing. 

Liana is sitting in one of the chairs at the end of the control room, cheek rested on one fist with her elbow on the arm of the chair. She looks tired. Virgo sits nervously across from her, his hands turning over and over in his lap, slipping against one another. 

She looks up, and raises her eyebrows. 

“You’re not in trouble. I wanted to check that you’ve found your settling alright so far. I understand Cliptic and Walter fought in front of you yesterday and I want to make it clear that while we may squabble, we are a family on this ship. We will do our best to look out for you if you do the same for us. We have not put forth a good face.”

Virgo laughs a light airy laugh and despite his discomfort yesterday finds himself saying, 

“It’s alright, I like it here so far, it’s good. It’s okay.” 

Liana nods.

“Good. Do you have any questions?” 

Virgo thinks long and hard. He has more than enough questions. But something about the distant way Liana conducts business with her crew, the way she seems quick to jump to answers rather than waffling around on the way to get there, something tells him she’ll answer question like his mother answered questions, precise and with little patience for his often-faltering learning of things that aren’t maps and stars.

“I think I’m alright,” Virgo says, quietly. And Liana nods. 

“Good boy,” she murmurs, standing, “I have some communications to make. I’ll see you at dinner, Virgo.” 

Virgo sighs as she stands and disappears into the hall. He looks down at his hands, examining the scar scrapes across his knuckles from scraping them along the reefs when swimming. No single scrape seemed noticeable at the time, at least, not that he remembers, but at that moment, lit up in the artificial light of the control room and the faint glow of stars, they look like a felled forest, criss-crossed raised lines along the backs of his fingers. He wonders how much he looks like a fighter.

When Precarious had its nose to the sky, Virgo saw the retracted places where guns might reveal themselves. He thinks back to dinner last night, and to the way Liana conducts herself not like the hostess of a hotel but like a military general. And he wonders, just briefly, how little war this vessel will really see. And what kind of “passengers” they’ll be taking on when they get to Pasmore. Why they don’t have more than just one now. Hardly worth it to be a private ferry across the galaxy. There’s not enough money in it to pay for the fuel cells. 

There has to be something more about Precarious, and the feeling of not knowing settles in his stomach like a stone, the hair on the back of his neck and the top of his shoulders raising as he realizes that whatever it is he doesn’t know about, he’s trapped in the middle of nothingness with it. 

Virgo swallows hard and is slammed back into the present, into appearing some semblance of alright when Scope half-slams open the door from the downstairs lounge and pauses almost-mid step to look over at Virgo, brows knitting in confusion and displeasure.

“Fledge. Thought y’were asleep,” he says, slipping something back into his pocket. Virgo’s eyes follow his hand, and then for a finite time meet Scope’s own. He inhales sharply and stands. 

“I have a job to do, right? I’m supposed to help you control and maintain the ship, as far as I know.” Virgo presses his lips together, nervous, looks at his light cloth shoes. Scope half-exhales, half-laughs through his nose, a short single laugh that Virgo’s getting to know as “Scope’s laugh”. He shakes his head.

“Not a lot to be done until we get close enough to bump ourselves out of higher than lightspeed. And Cliptic, Devon, and the Bot do the maintaining, I just keep her in the air and keep us going. Whatever that means on the given day.” Virgo nods. 

“How long until we’re close enough, then?”

“Four, five hours, I’d say,” Scope says, glancing at ring on his left ring finger which read the time in small digital letters. Scope has scars on his hands, too, but not the same kind, scars that say he’s done heavy work with machines and mechanical parts, even if the scar on his face says combat clear as day. Virgo wonders what he did to end up with someone who might as well be an outlaw. 

“I’ll go see if they need any help, then,” Virgo says, “I’ll be back in a couple hours to help however I can.” 

Scope laughs again.

“This isn’t Astarum Flight Academy. You’re here to read us your Navcards. If you want to spend the other eight hours of your day doing nothing you don’t have to worry about making busywork for yourself. None of us can do what you’re doing, as long as you’re doing it you’re worth the space you take up.”

“I’m not sure that’s what you said yesterday,” Virgo points out. 

Scope raises his eyebrows. 

"Maybe I've changed my opinions on you a little."

Virgo is a little taken aback by the honest answer, he expected a different reaction. More teasing. Maybe it's a culture barrier, he's not sure. 

"Don't worry. Not asking you to be my best friend, fledge. You're useful, that's all." 

Virgo looks at Scope, trying to figure out what that means in a more complex manner, what's sitting just underneat the man's seeming innocence. 

"I'm going to go help Cliptic now," he says, without really thinking about it, and without waiting for an answer he disappears down into the lounge and through the hall.

Cliptic's sitting on her main examining table with a small screen in her hands, organizing small squares on the screen. She doesn't look up as Virgo approaches, and he clears his throat as he comes to a stop beside her. She jumps, almost dropping her screen and he gives her an apologetic look. 

"Hello, sorry, you frightened me." 

Virgo shakes his head. 

"No, no, I'm sorry, hah, are you alright?" Virgo smiles at her and she gives him an amused but affectionate returning look.

"Quite, but are you? Is something wrong?" 

"Oh, no, I'm here to help you, as a navigator my job is to help with the control and maintenance of the ship when I'm not plotting a course," Virgo says, trying to put as much conviction into it as he did when saying it to Scope but now it just sounds a little silly. He was right, they're not in the Astarum Flight Academy. 

Cliptic laughs, but smiles a little wider. 

"That is splendid! But the problem is that I do not really have any work for you right now," Cliptic seems almost apologetic about this, "Devon is on-shift in the engine room if you would like to see, it, though. I can take you back there." 

Virgo agrees, that seems do-able. He's not great with machines but he wouldn't mind seeing what it is that pushes this tiny hunk of metal through space. Plus, it's probably a lot less having to stare at open outer space than the control room is. 

 

The hallway leading into the engine room doubles around the ship and is much narrower than the rest of them, more enclosed. The door at the end of it is heavier than any door Virgo's seen on the ship, held fast by multiple winding cranks and what seems like multiple consoles on either side of the door. His eyes don't follow Cliptic's number of passwords to get into the room but it clicks open without much fuss, and Virgo finds himself thoroughly proven wrong. Because this is terrifying.

The engine room is a long cylinder which opens up at one end like the base of a vase or a candlestick, allowing room for the mass core that capacitates the travel at the speed they're at. It hangs hovering within an opening straight out to space, seemingly nothing protecting the  entire room from the circular space around it dropping off into vast nothing and stars falling away behind them. 

"Kasvak vak!" Virgo exclaims under his breath, taking a step immediately backward into the already closed door. 

"Don't worry," Cliptic says. At one edge of the cyllindrical room leading to the core, there is a small alcove in the wall, a break in the humming machinery that fills the entire cylinder and led to by the singular footpath through the thing, which branches around the core to allow one to walk right up to the edge presumably. The alcove is full of monitors and a small, low to the ground chair which is covered in blankets. Devon is tucked into the chair, talking animatedly with a small hovering robot about the size of a loaf of bread. Cliptic calls out to him and he looks up, waving with a friendly grin. Today he looks like he hasn't shaved, and has a soft spattering of stubble across his lower jaw. 

"Hi! Cliptic! Virgil!" Devon exclaims. 

"Virgo," Cliptic corrects, gently taking Virgo's arm and leading him down the narrow path toward the alcove. Virgo's eyes stay firmly fixed on the gaping space between the core and the wall, on the stars spiralling away. He tries not to feel like throwing up, but his stomach won't stop turning over and over again.

"Virgo, sorry, hi!" Devon says, and then seems to notice Virgo's fear. 

"There's an artificial wall made by the core pressure, don't worry, nothing's actually open or nothing!" He pulls himself out of the alcove, which now Virgo can see is a little lower than the walkway itself, and tip-tap runs his way to the other end of the room, standing directly by where the walls seemingly drop off. He knocks on the empty space between the core and the wall and there's a dull sound like hitting concrete accompanied by a fainter metal ringing. 

"See? Totally solid, come here, check it out!" 

Virgo's eyes widen and he frantically shakes his head, but Cliptic pushes him forward and he keeps walking without really being able to stop himself and all of a sudden he finds himself staring out at open space feeling like there should be hundred mile winds pulling him out behind the ship and far far away to an awful cold and breathless death but instead it's just like standing in a room, standing at a window looking out and in the core of the fear a seed of intoxication forms. Virgo puts his hand out and finds solid something where air should be directly in front of him. He gently presses and finds full resistance, takes another step forward and his knee hits the same solid invisible wall, he presses his forhead against it and looks out across the vastness of space with dizzying wonder. 

He feels exposed and completely walled off at the same time, like he's caught in a paradox and his skin is trying to react like the core of a star, fuse itself and create light. He's terrified and amazed and feels his legs start to shake uncontrollably as he presses forward, what feels like milimeters from certain death and vast nothing. 

His heart feels like it's stopped and sped up to the same speed the ship's going, and suddenly his stomach turns and he's choking back vomit, falling to his knees away from the wall and rocking, his body trying desperately to find a balance between fear and an overwhelming sense of touching something humans were never meant to touch, seeing what humans were never meant to see. There's a concerned beeping somewhere above his left ear before anyone else is at his side, the robot bobbing just inside the vague periphery of Virgo's vision and Cliptic is roughly thrusting a bag into his hands. Virgo feels the contents of his stomach leave before his brain can register them going. 

"We all get spacesick the first time," Cliptic says, softly, he can vaguely register her hand rubbing comforting circles on his back, "I'm surprised you held out through the lightspeed jump." 

"Anxiety," Virgo breathes through a fuzzy brain, just trying to stop being dizzy. 

Cliptic laughs, "You are an anxious one. Why don't we go back to the medbay for now? I've got something for nausea. You can come back here later." 

Virgo shakes his head, feeling his legs tremble while he unsteadily finds his feet. 

"I have work to do," he mumbles, holding the rail on the side of the walkway facing the core like his life depends on it. He doesn't look over his shoulder at space open like a window behind him. He tries not to think about it. Cliptic gives him a concerned look, but nods, sighing heavily. 

"Please come see me if you feel ill again," she concedes. Virgo nods. Devon looks at him with eyebrows pulled up in concern and pulls the robot a little closer to him so it doesn't bump into Virgo. The robot continues beeping worriedly. 

"I'm okay," Virgo insists, and Cliptic's taking the bag back out of his hands and nodding. 

"I know, just please see me if you are not, alright?" 

"Alright," Virgo mumbles, the embarrasment setting in now. How stupid he must have looked. He mumbles a few curses under his breath and then looks back to Devon. 

"So what are we doing here?"

The engine room shift seems relatively simple; because of the ship's age it has to be monitored constantly for issues so someone has to sit in the alcove in the engine room at almost all times to watch the monitors, but issues aren't hugely common and it seems more like a quiet place to sit away from the rest of the ship. Inside the alcove, it's hard to see the gaping hole at the back of the ship, and easy enough to forget how remote a starship is by nature. It's cozy and reminds Virgo more of a reading nook from back home than a surveilance area, but he figures it's largely because Devon has made it a nest of blankets and posters from planets all around the galaxy, from volcanos to tropical beaches, plaster the walls. It feels more like a gettaway than a mechanical necessity.

The small floating robot, Devon calls it Rudy, is meant to be deployed for maintenance. There are miniature airlocks around the engine room and the rest of the ship allowing it to exit and perform maintenance on the ship while it's still in motion by attaching to a number of tracks along the outside of the ship. Mostly the robot's job is to fix things the human crew on the ship can't reach or can't access while the ship is moving as fast as it is. Devon also explains that it can enter the core itself, but he's never made it do that because that seems cruel, even to do to a non-sentient robot. 

It's interesting to hear how Devon talks about the little piece of technology; a robot-sympathetic view is rare in Cavan, and rarer within in the greater Astarum border. People with opinions like Devon’s are the ones who to this day are arguing in interstellar courts constantly for the rights of AI and sentient technology. Virgo hasn't ever met a Sent. He's tried not to form an opinion. He’s never had the chance to see a robot-sympathetic person without the paint of bad media light, though. It’s a new experience. He leaves the engine room feeling better but a little like his entire worldview has been shifted two inches to the side.

The control room has dimmer lights by the time Virgo climbs the stairs and quietly enters. Most of the light comes from the stars outside and the glowing electronic readings across the control panels. Scope has his cheek pressed down on one fist on the arm of his chair, and his closed eyes open slowly as Virgo approaches. 

“You weren’t at dinner,” he says, slowly stretching himself out of the chair, “But you’re on time to help get us to a stop. Sit down.” He gestures to the chair. Virgo’s taken by surprise and just looks blankly at the open chair. 

“I don’t think I’m licensed to do that,” he says, eyes still fixed on the chair. Scope snorts his short laugh, giving Virgo a look that says ‘you’re something else.’ 

“Surprisingly enough, Guild doesn’t require you’re licensed. Just that at least one person who is is on board,” he says, “Sit.” 

Virgo sits, gingerly, very careful not to touch any of the controls as he does so. The chair is warm and wide enough to pull his legs up into, comfortable and relatively low to the ground. 

“If you want to help, you might as well learn this stuff. Alright, look at the panel there, that’s the trajectory you mapped, now there’s the slowdown point.” 

Scope leans in over Virgo’s shoulder to point at a colored point on the display, and another just beyond it.

“That one’s the disengage point, and the one beyond it is the beginning of the full stop. As we get closer… ah, yeah, there it goes.” A small ‘3 minutes’ pops up next to the first dot as the point representing them approaches it. 

“Now that’ll unlock the drag controls over here,” Scope says, putting a hand on the back of Virgo’s chair and swinging it on its track around to face the circular control array on one end. Virgo blinks in surprise as he’s suddenly facing it. Scope points to a button on the lower edge of the array labelled ‘drag’.

“Hit that, careful of the thing next to it, don’t want to fry poor Devon in the engine room,” Scope says with a soft laugh. Virgo swallows hard and quickly presses the button, withdrawing his hand as fast as he can. Scope snorts, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“Not that careful, you’ll be okay. Alright, now we wait.” He slides Virgo back over to the main display. He leans on both his arms on the back of the chair. 

“You ever done a flight simulator?” 

Virgo laughs. 

“Me? God no,” he says. 

“Then I’m not going to let you land us, but I’ll let you get us to through the next point. What  _ did _ you do on that wet mess of a planet?” 

Virgo scowls, keeping his eyes fixed on the display. 

“I helped run my mother’s business when she had bigger responsibilities,” he picks to say, carefully. 

“She get caught in the draft?” Scope asks, leaning over to scratch one shoulder blade, nonchalant. 

“No, just had other things to do.” 

“What kind of business?” 

“Fishing,” Virgo lies, quickly. Undersea terraform is a high-profile business; one his mother made enough money in to put her in the same social class as Cavan’s elite and eventually give her the connections to take the council’s head seat in place of her more qualified older brother. It would give away who he is. It would give away the soft life he lived before this. Something tells him it’s something Scope would judge him for. 

Scope looks him up and down.

“Yeah, fitting. You look like you been on the water in the sun your whole life. Do you know how to swim?”

Virgo nods. “You can’t live on an ocean planet without knowing how to swim. Most Viltiri learn before they can walk.” 

“That makes one of us. I’m from the desert,” Scope offers, then as the countdown starts for their next point, he glides Virgo over to the opposite side of the panel. “Alright, push this.” He points at a larger button. “Then pull this.” Then at a lever. As Virgo does so he watches Scope out of the corner of his eye, examining his pale skin and the dark circles under his eyes. He doesn’t look like travellers he’s seen from desert planets, no, most of them look like Virgo does, with deep brown or golden brown skin and sharp features. He doesn’t expect the heavy lurch forward the ship does and it to feel like they’re suddenly travelling backwards very very fast. 

“Vak,” Virgo swears, as the ship gets suddenly brighter as they slow down and approach the speed of light again. There’s another sharp lurch as they come out of the bright glow and things begin moving slowly again.

“Alright, my turn,” Scope says, tapping Virgo’s shoulder and sliding into the seat when he vacates it. 

“Next time, take the lever a little slower and you’ll have a less bumpy re-entry to normal physics, just a tip,” he says over his shoulder, leaning forward and punching in a series of commands as they sail past a gaseous giant planet and he takes the manual wheel to avoid a thin band of icy debris orbiting far around it.  

“You know anything about Pasmore?” he asks. 

“Trade planet, like Cavan, right?” Virgo asks in return. Scope snorts and shakes his head.

“Yes, but don’t expect there to be as much breathing room as Cavan. Pasmore’s busier. A lot busier. We’ll have at least a couple hours to wander around, I’ll show you. Captain’s handling this job on her own and we’re picking up a couple passengers here, so we have some time. It’ll take me an hour or so to get us into orbit if you want to go get whatever you want ready to walk around on land for a little while again.”

Virgo nods. 

“Thanks,” he mumbles, as he straightens up again, and the ship takes a wide curve around a free-floating space station. 

“No problem, fledge.” 

 

Pasmore’s atmosphere is dotted with thick clouds and they land in mid-daylight even though Virgo’s tired enough for it to be the middle of the night. He’s starting to realize how fallible planet-days are to starship-days already. The jet-lag is still killer, though. 

The port they land in is tower built in the center of a teeming city, the port the highest building but only by miniscule margins of the atmosphere-scraping buildings around it. Scope navigates into it with ease, and they’re landed within the projected hour. Cliptic catches Virgo in the crew lounge on his way to the cargo hold to exit, and looks him up and down. She eyes the draping layered neck of the shirt Virgo’s put on, down to the loose ankles of the cloth pants Cavanis are usually seen wearing.

“You look fittingly like a tourist,” she says with her accent, then eyes his pockets. 

“How much money are you carrying on you?” 

“A few coral sheks, why?” Virgo asks, suddenly worried. Cliptic clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth in surprise.

“Oh, Virgo, carry silver if you are going to carry your planet’s currency. Coral is worth much more outside Cavan, it is a prime target for theft with such little weight and so much value,” she says gently, as though he’s very new to all this. Virgo tries not to feel resentment for it, because he is. But he has a few years on her and he feels he should know at least a little more, even if he doesn’t in all practicality. He does disappear to go find a few silver sheks instead, though.


	4. Consider In Your Travels

Stepping onto the streets of Pasmore from the ground level exit of its main starship port is like setting foot on a multifaceted jewel, the dark streets are made of stones that cast the slightest reflections, and every store front and vehicle lining the streets make every surface not packed with people glitter like gold. What seem to be locals wear bright greens and purples, beads made of shining stones around their necks and wrists, they beckon tourists into small stalls just off the wide doors of the port building with promises of things they’ve never seen before, not in the entire galaxy.

Virgo is immediately struck silent by the sheer mass of sound and movement. From every surface there are a hundred details, most moving and many whistling, whispering, wailing, and talking, everything a blur. It’s a balancing act of pure precarious life, every building full to the top floor and every crevice utilized for something else. He’s never seen so many people in one place in his entire life, even when tourists flocked to Cavan for funerals or festivals. 

It’s terrifying and exciting, like standing on the edge of space or the shore of the ocean while a huge wave comes in. 

The anxiety makes the bottom of Virgo’s stomach tingle and drop, and his fingertips feel a mile from his arms, but there’s a force behind him driving him forward into the crowd. 

As soon as they’re out of the doors of the port, a number of dark-robed men and women approach them, their robes and skin outfitted with dark, glimmering ornamentation and tech, their hoods pulled down far enough to cover their eyes. They wear shades of paint on their hands with no color; whites and greys and blacks. 

One of them shoves a cloth bag into Virgo’s hands and says, in a softer voice than Virgo was expecting,

“This is from Orion. This is from the beyond. Go well.” 

“Go well,” his companions echo in chorus, the youngest, a girl of maybe fourteen looks up at their group and smiles while she does. 

“Consider in your travels visiting the Saints,” says the first man, equally as soft, “The Saints need starships like the desert needs water. Death may come for us all, but we pray it is gentler than it has been there. Go well.” 

“Go well,” his companions once more echo.

Virgo nods, respectfully but awkwardly as they disengage and seem to repeat the process with another group of travellers exiting the port behind them. He peers after them and Scope chuckles to himself while Dane wraps a hand around Virgo’s shoulder and drags him forward.

“Those were Orion’s Emissaries, from the OE territory just off the Republic of Orion,” Dane explains as he takes the bag that the man gave Virgo and puts it inside the larger shoulder bag he’s carrying, “They worship all sorts of crazy shit out there, death gods and all. I hear they sacrifice people all the time.” 

“That’s not true,” interjects Cliptic, “They’re just like anyone else. No human sacrifices or cannibalism. I think some of them believe in blood magic though.”

“Yeah, definitely blood magic,” Scope adds, combing a hand through his hair and leading the party down the busy main street away from the port. His longer stride matched by Dane’s is hard for Cliptic and Virgo to keep up with in the thick crowd. 

“Knew a guy in Astarum Flight Academy who was from the OE, he almost bled himself dry praying for a battle we almost didn’t win once. Crazy guy, never anything but loyal though,” Scope continues. He seems to be half-throwing his voice as a method of finding each other in the throng. 

“Havad, right? I never saw another man wearing the hooded uniform,” says Cliptic, in return. She grabs a gentle hold of Virgo’s elbow to keep him beside her. 

“Yeah, Havad. Didn’t realize the uniform was actually all certified.” 

The small split between the two pairs closes again and they walk quietly together as a group for a few moments before Scope pulls them off into a side street.

“Have you been here before?” Virgo asks Scope, as they take another sharp turn into another street. 

“Loads of times,” returns Scope, “We picked Devon up here a year or two ago. And we come back pretty frequently. It’s in the middle of everything. And for a CCA planet it’s out of the way of the fighting.”

“Don’t be too quick to say that,” Dane warns, “The warfront moves every day, you know that as well as anyone.” 

“Almost a century of war hasn’t touched Pasmore, I don’t think it will, too many valuable trade routes for both sides,” Scope argues, “Too much civilian death on both sides.” 

Dane makes a noncommittal humming sound and shrugs, something of a way of agreeing to disagree. Cliptic lets go of Virgo’s elbow, which is kind of a relief. He’s really not used to all of these foreign people who seem a lot more used to touching than people from his home planet. 

“Where are we going first?” Cliptic asks, to break tension probably, but Virgo finds it hard to read her sometimes. Is she clueless, or does she just play it? Or is it the fact that the common language seems to be a second one for her and he has issues reading her more subtle facial expressions than those he’s used to?

“Grab something to eat, I’m sick of protein blocks, my treat,” Scope says. Dane casts him a teasing look. 

“What? Don’t like my cooking?” 

“I didn’t say that,” says Scope, snorting. He leads them into a small alley and up a narrow flight of stairs to a tiny restaurant Virgo never would have guessed was there.

It’s a small room, a diner-style counter at one end and a meager number of tables and chairs scattered across tiled floor and led-enabled walls that look pulled from a hundred year old magazine first detailing the capabilities of color-lighted walls. It smells strongly of cloves and spices from faraway planets, heavy cooking steam billows from huge pots behind the counter so thick they fog the few small windows looking out over the busy Pasmoran street below. A few men mill around at the seats at the bar, hands cracked from hard work and accents thick and heavily recognizable as from the core of the CCA. These are locals, not tourists or traders like those that litter the street from every corner of the galaxy. 

They don’t seem offended at the intrusion, though, and the short, dark-skinned woman behind the counter gives them a warm smile as they enter. Despite the welcome atmosphere, the blatant map of the CCA on one wall puts Virgo’s stomach at ill-ease and the accents in their voices make the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He’s never known a CCA citizen not to be a killer. He’s never known one not to hate his home planet and its politics more than anything alive or dead. He tries not to let that cloud his judgement, the people in front of him are just people, but he’s terrified. 

A pale man at the corner of the bar eyes him, still talking to his friend in that accent, cold green eyes fixed on Virgo’s nervous hazel ones. 

Scope orders food for all of them, not asking what anyone wants, maybe because it seems like Dane and Cliptic have already been here before, they go to settle at a table while Virgo and Scope wait for their food. They do so in silence, but Virgo can tell Scope is watching him, watching the hypervigilant jump every time one of the men at the bar moves. He wonders what Scope thinks of him, idly, without much thought to why he’s thinking it. 

They settle at the small corner table with deep bowls of frothy stew made of chunks of unidentifiable meat in pungent broth. 

“Ceresian Cuisine at its finest,” Scope says with a sigh, setting a bowl down in front of everyone before setting into his own with an affection Virgo recognizes as one born of familiarity. He makes a mental note to learn more about Ceresian custom, about the small border planet between the CCA and the Astarum that he’s only ever heard of in passing. 

The meal is quick, filling, and tastes of stronger seasoning than Virgo’s ever tasted coming from a planet where spices are scarce and non-salt seasonings are even scarcer. They step back out into the street as Pasmore’s similar-to-Cavan’s red star begins to fall behind the city skyscrapers. As it does the temperature at the street level falls into a kind of chill Virgo knows only from Cavan’s coldest nights. He feels the gooseflesh raise against his skin.

Cliptic notices. 

“Do you have a jacket back on the ship?” she asks as Scope begins leading them on a narrow path through the street again, carefully avoiding the hovering and non-hovering cars which try desperately to find clearance in the mass crowds which still fill the street despite the impending darkness. Something else is coming alive in the main streets, too, now, something Virgo recognizes from the slums. A covert market hidden between the cracks of the stalls selling more innocuous things like food and exotic pets.

Virgo shakes his head.

“Didn’t think I’d need one,” he says, “I didn’t pack one.” 

Cliptic laughs a soft laugh, “The whole galaxy isn’t as warm as Cavan is.”

“Scope, we should stop into that clothing store you like,” she calls ahead. Scope looks over his shoulder and gives her an affirmative upward flick of the wrist and downward flick of a half-closed palm that Virgo recognizes from Astarum military sign language. Their course changes, now facing toward a crest of mountains distantly visible between the cracks in the sky scrapers in the direction they left the starport from. 

The crowds are thinning just a little by the time Scope leads them into another hidden establishment it seems only locals should know about. It has a low ceiling and is packed with racks upon racks of clothing, mostly things that Virgo could see Scope wearing; things reminiscent of Astarum military clothing and the alternative culture’s fashion which has popped up in the CCA in recent years, a response to a youth generation disillusioned by a war gone on too long. 

The rest of his party disperses to parse through thickly populated racks, so Virgo follows their example, examining rows of leather and metal fiber-jackets boasting heavy protection but not the movement Virgo has grown to expect out of his clothing. 

Cavan is warm, and its formal dress largely draping around the neck and with pants that have legs sagging to bunch around the ankles, Virgo has grown accustomed to having freely moving arms and shoulders, and to not being weighed down by any piece of clothing he wears. 

It’s hard to imagine putting something like anything here on, but before he can really say anything to the same effect, Cliptic is calling Scope over and giggling excitedly, gesturing at something, and Virgo’s attention is drawn to her. 

Scope is laughing, too, then, conspiratorially, and they’re bringing something up to the small sales counter set at the far back of the store, and then it’s in a bag and they’re gesturing Virgo and Dane out and onto the street again and Cliptic shoves the bag into Virgo’s hands.

“A welcome gift!” she says, still laughing, and he peers suspiciously inside.

The jacket is soft, not leather, the kind of force-rejecting fabric militaries use to make jackets, less stiff than leather but stiffer than most cloth. Across the top of the shoulders, the word “fledge” is written in all-capitals, bold lettering easily viewable. Underneath it is a standard transport ship with the wings of a blackbird attached at the sides, spanning the entire back of the jacket. 

Virgo snorts, and then can’t help but laugh. 

“I’m not wearing this,” he says, through giggles. 

“You are so wearing that,” Scope says, clasping a hand on Virgo’s shoulder as Dane leans in to look at the design.

“That’s some nice work,” he says, “Fuckin’ bargain to find it here. You should absolutely wear it.”

After a few minutes of teasing and standing around on the street corner, Virgo’s finally convinced into the more restricting clothing. It feels unnatural where his arms meet his body and around his elbows, but it’s a discomfort that becomes bearable within a few minutes of getting used to it. It’s worth it for the way Scope and Cliptic laugh for the next five minutes, genuine happy laughter. It feels like a long time since Virgo’s been this at ease. It’s easy to forget just two days ago he was slated to be stuck on Cavan forever and now he’s standing on a planet light years away laughing with a group of people who were strangers until recently.

The next hour is spent wandering between the slowly closing daytime market stalls and the slowly opening nighttime market ones. Virgo sees animals he’s never seen before, a larger, pointier furred mammal like the cats kept as companions sometimes at home that Scope calls a “dog” (ugly name for something so cute, Virgo thinks) and is shocked Virgo has never even heard of, birds with hooked beaks and huge claws in bright colors, more furred mammals called “monkeys” which hang around many stalls not as merchandise but to steal food and swing away through the urban landscape on arms and hands so long they weird Virgo out a little. And there are foods and smells he’s never smelled before, and unforeseen body modifications unlike the tattoos that spring across Cliptic’s skin like art; skin dyed vibrant colors in its entirety, horns, and long teeth, there are men with metal piecing together the majority of comically oversized frames, and women with diamonds instead of teeth. On every other corner there’s a brothel, and on every one there are one or two people selling the most illegal substances known to man.

Scope sneaks off to talk to one of the sellers on a corner as they make their way back to Precarious and the starship port, and Virgo offers to wait for him but he insists he’ll meet them all back at the ship. He does, however, toss Virgo a ring of ancient heavy duty keys. 

“If Devon left you’ll need those,” explains Scope, waving Virgo off.

 

The port is strangely empty. Few ships seem to be docking or leaving, few seem to be there at all. Now that Virgo thinks about it, the walk back was quiet too. It doesn’t seem typical for a city like this to have quiet hours, but he doesn’t question it too much; this place is foreign. Maybe there’s a noise ordinance or something. 

Dane seems unbothered, but as Virgo watches, Cliptic seems to become more and more uneasy as they climb through deserted and echoing stairwells to the lowest level docks for D-Class ships.

Virgo feels anxiety welling in his stomach but falls as quiet as the other two as they round the corner into the open-air docking platform. It’s empty except for Precarious, nose up but hatch closed and most of the lights off. 

Something feels deeply wrong about how quiet even the city underneath them has fallen. He looks up, trying to check Dane and Cliptic’s expressions for any sign of what’s going on, but he finds them looking away from him out over the city and toward the horizon, and upward. Virgo’s eyes slowly follow theirs to the sky. 

In the sky sit three hundred white glimmers, catching the light of the mostly-set sun like diamonds set into a fabric pillow the color of the twilight atmosphere, they just hover, on the edge of view, a threat. 

“Astarum,” breathes Dane, with a deep discomfort to his voice that fits ill within it. Cliptic looks somewhere between tears and anger, a faraway look slowly taking over her face.

“Fuck,” she hisses. Virgo looks between both of them, trying to piece it together. Why an invasion on Pasmore? For every reason Scope listed and more, it by every right should be a planet with some immunity from the war if only for its value to either side of it. The Astarum will lose good interest if this is the militaristic visit which would instill this fear.

“They can’t be here to invade without prompt,” Virgo’s voice waivers.

“They are not,” Cliptic murmurs.

“They’re here for what the Cap’s got,” Dane finishes, dread staking his voice into the air like a promise. He knows this, it’s not speculation. As they watch, one ship slowly breaks off into the lead, and the fleet makes a wide turn, baring down on them like bullets from miles away.

* * *

Somewhere, in the depths of Pasmore’s capital city, Parvaine, there’s a small antique shop, run by a peculiar man who is a little less than half human and a little more than half circuits and wires, and staffed by a peculiar piece of technology which calls herself “Selah”.

Selah is in many respects an antique herself, despite being only a few years old. She is also in many respects much like a human; and appears moreso than her employer whose wires and gadgets are left bare for the world to see. 

Selah looks, for every intent and human, like a human girl of nineteen or twenty. Her artificial black hair feels real, her pale synthetic skin even moreso. Only the near-invisible panel separation of her lower jaw against her cheek and at the lower edge against her neck, and the doll-like joints on her limbs, give away that she is anything other than a human being, living and breathing.  If one were to look too deeply into her open mouth, they would see the mechanics and tubes that allow her to “pass” as human, eating and drinking and producing small amounts of bodily fluid. 

Selah was one of the first of her kind ever created; a robot who can not only learn and hold sentience but also pass as human while doing it. She was not created for good purpose. But in this little storefront in the busiest city on Pasmore, she feels she has escaped that initial purpose and has found something much better to do with her time; read.

She spends most of her time tucked behind the counter with a book, and she is routinely considered the best woman to bargain with anywhere in the CCA. She will not screw anyone who doesn’t deserve it around around and she will not take any bad words or conmen kindly into her shop.

Selah is the reason this neighborhood respects inhuman people the way they do. And she’s proud of it.

She’s also the reason her employer’s son respects those whose blood runs half or more in circuitry rather than veins the way he does. And she’s always happy to see him return to her shop when he visits Pasmore. She suspects, even, that her employer sees less of his son these days than she does.

When the door bells jingle and the five foot-nothing raven haired man steps foot on the welcome mat, she beams, and then she is suddenly very concerned, as the implications hit her.

“You shouldn’t be here this time,” she says, “I’ve already seen Liana, you know how it will look.”

“The Astarum won’t know where that thing went until it’s at the Galactic Bar, don’t worry.” 

Selah shakes her head. 

“Do you want some tea?” she asks, setting her book down. Today it’s a novel detailing the adventures of a Deltiri sailor who found the bottom of the Cavani ocean, fiction of course. Nonfiction is too depressing.

“No thanks,” says Devon, slinging himself into an ancient chair from a starship long-scrapped, “I’m here for a couple Navcards. We picked up a nav, finally.” 

Selah raises her eyebrows. 

“Liana finally gave in.” 

“She did. We put an ad out in Cavan, when we were there for the festival and to check up on, you know.” 

“Your primary risk, I hope with today’s secondary one you still have it secured,” Serah says, carefully, then she realizes what Devon said and stops, looking straight into his eyes.

“This navigator you picked up, he isn’t a redhead is he?” 

“Yeah yeah, primary’s safe, always has been always will be don’t worry, and nah. Dark hair like half the galaxy.” 

Serah nods, sighing. Just a hunch. She sighs, going over to her box of old Guild Navcards and picking it up, heaving it over to Devon for him to look through. He paws through it and chitters about how Rudy’s doing, and how Precarious’ maintenance is being kept up. Serah half-listens and mostly worries.

This afternoon she facilitated the biggest deal she’s ever facilitated. She might actually have enough money to get to a quieter, nicer planet now. Maybe. If all goes well.  

She’s started staring at the opposite wall by the time Devon catches her wandering thoughts. And he’s opening his mouth to say something about it when she falls to the floor, a flicker through her body causing lights behind her eyes and across her face and shoulders to light up for a finite moment before she’s imobile.

But she can hear. She still processes the sound of heavy footsteps and muffled struggling. But it’s over before she can force against every warning in her body screaming for her to stay down, override messages from an outside source, back enough to struggle up over the counter to see that the front door of her shop is wide open and there is suddenly no man before her. The Navcards are missing, too. She flips open a panel in her left arm and taps a few quick commands into the panel of buttons there, saving data her system would have otherwise tossed out as unnecessary information. 

She knows one person who will be able to ascertain from that data what exactly just happened, and who might be the only chance Serah has of keeping what she just helped Captain Liana Doste sell stay sold.

* * *

 

Scope’s caught up to Cliptic, Virgo, and Dane by the time the ships have started moving faster toward them, and he stops dead in his tracks when he sees them but his face was already creased with terror. Something in his eyes while he looks at those ships says something much more immediate than the confused fear Virgo is feeling, something much more acute. 

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck,” Scope mutters, trembling, eyes wide as he watches, “Get the fuck in now, Virgo, keys.” 

“What about Liana?” Cliptic asks, her voice immediately dropping into something closer to stable as she watches Scope’s resolve crumble. 

“We’ll come back, we’ll fucking come back, get the fuck in now, Virgo, keys,” Scope insists, the end comes out as a bark directed at Virgo and Virgo jumps, shoving the keys back into Scope’s hands and flinching away, but Scope’s too fearful to notice, as soon as the metal’s touched his hand, he’s at the cargo door, fumbling to get it open and Dane is stepping up to help pull it down to ground level.

“In in in,” Scope barks again, and Virgo can see something very close to breaking behind the half-crumbling facade of being functional enough to get away. Scope looks more like a scared animal here than a pilot. Virgo’s the first to take the cue and scramble inside the hull of the ship, but he’s quickly followed by the rest and while Dane and Cliptic go about closing the cargo door, Scope grabs Virgo’s sleeve and pulls him along, half-running, toward the control room. As soon as they’re up the stairs, Scope pushes Virgo down by his shoulders into the pilot seat and swings him around to the circular array. 

“When I say go, you push the little yellow button at the top and then the big red button at the bottom, got it?” he asks, not really leaving enough time for an answer, his voice is cracking despite trying to stay steady, “Hold on tight, fledge.” 

He turns and pushes up on a lever fast enough to send the nose of the ship bouncing back into horizontal position, then slams on a button beneath the control panel a few times, swearing insistently to himself until the button causes Precarious to lurch forward on wheels Virgo figured were somewhere but had never been able to locate. They speed off the platform without taking off, and once the back wheels come off the platform, there’s a heavy clunk and Virgo can feel his stomach seemingly leave his body as the ship begins to plummet toward the city street below.

“Now now now,” Scope half-shouts and Virgo isn’t watching his hands anymore as his own fingers tremble over the buttons and he feels another forward lurch, sees the thinnest sliver of sky between two skyscrapers, and then everything is glowing white.

Virgo’s eyes flick back nervously to Scope, .whose hands are on the manual steering controls and pulling the larger main half-wheel hard to the left, hard enough that Virgo feels Pasmore’s gravity pull him hard to the side, toward the control panel and the wall behind it. 

He can hear crashing underneath them, and Scope’s lower lip is so hard lodged between his teeth that he can see small beads of red form around them, but with the hard veer to the left and no real sense of direction in the blind glow of cosmic background radiation, Virgo can’t tell whether or not they’re going the right or wrong direction.

As the glow fades, they’re suddenly out in the black again, Pasmore’s atmosphere not even in sight. 

“Did we just hit lightspeed from 0?” Virgo asks, his voice shaking.

“Not 0, that’s impossible, just close,” returns Scope in a voice that says this is not the time to apply confused wonder and it’s a much better time to apply confused terror. 

Scope half-slams his fist down on a commbox button and says, over intercom to the entire ship. 

“Cliptic, get the fuck to the engine room,” he growls into the box. 

“Oh I am here,” Cliptic responds half a second later, “And they are following us.” 

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck,” Scope chants, dropping his fist from the button and almost-dragging Virgo out of his chair so that he can sit down. 

“Well fledge,” mutters Scope, after a few quiet seconds of frantic button pushing and dial turning, “It’s your time to shine, you wanna be a navigator? Navigate us to anywhere that isn’t here.” 

Virgo nods, throat going dry as he realizes he has no idea where the fuck to take them, but he figures there probably isn’t anything good going to happen if he doesn’t take the order. He tries not to think about why the Astarum is chasing the tiny ship they’re on, but the worry seeps into the back of his mind like a leak in the foundation and it sits there while he climbs his way to the navigation walk and pushes a few Navcards shakily into the astronavigator. 

He doesn’t know where to start, anywhere away from here is the only direction he has and that could be anywhere. He opts for heavy star clusters, more stars means more interference. He starts plotting a custom course, not to anywhere, just a dizzying dance through the stars between them and the galactic bar, the center of the galaxy. He tries to prioritize speed; he knows that Astarum Peacekeepers are rarely fast, and when they are it takes too many valuable fuel reserves to be worth it; in the middle of this thought it hits him.

Most peacekeeper models only have enough fuel cells to facilitate two faster than light jumps; one for takeoff and one for speeding up after slowing down for recon, they’re expected to dock regularly on most planets they pass when on patrol, where they can re-up the fuel supply.

Virgo watched them speed up after recon just now, and they must have taken off from somewhere else before this. He deletes half his course and zooms in on the tiny portion where it now ends, adding a tiny note there that Scope will be able to read, and then plotting an almost straight course from there to the center of the galaxy. 

He sends it off and descends the ladder to stand behind Scope at his chair. Scope’s face looks just as close to breaking as it did before, but the thin veneer of “act before you freak out” has hardened and he’s mostly glaring out the transparent front shields of the control room without looking as his hand move on the controls, trying to keep their position half-cloaked by quick jumps back and forth too quick for most instruments to pick them up. It slows their course a little but makes them nigh-undetectable except for on high-power scoping equipment, which at least a few of the fleet behind them must have but Virgo isn’t going to question this. 

“Will what I just sent you work?” Virgo asks, and Scope doesn’t respond until he’s pulled it up on the display and looked through it quickly enough to get at least the vaguest idea of what they’re doing. 

“It’s worth a shot, and it’s a smart plan even if it gets us killed, I don’t have better right now,” he breathes, sighing and scrubbing both his hands through his hair as he leans back, closing his eyes, trying to gather himself. 

Finally, he leans forward and talks into the commbox. 

“It’s going to get bumpy, hold on guys, sorry,” he says, softly, and takes another deep breath before he presses ‘begin course’ on the display and takes the larger wheel again, jerking it erratically to make it seem like their core thrusters are experiencing issues, and then letting it go again, continuing on for a little while and making another turn which the ships behind them should expect them to make. Scope quickly alternates between making it look like their thrusters are just about to fail and  making it look as though he as a pilot is trying to deal with that a few times before Scope abruptly glides his chair over to set about taking them out of lightspeed in a probably suicidally-fast manner. 

As they shift into the bright light and then out of it again as they slow, Scope takes a wide turn and looks at Virgo. 

“Alright, here’s hoping,” he breathes, and kills the engine. The curve, matched with the way Scope flips the ship so its belly is up in the direction they were going, and a number of short bursts from the thrusters to try to fully make it look like this is not intentional, slows them to a near-stop, and Virgo can now watch as a huge dark gaseous planet comes into view just a little to the left and down from the view of the transparent front of the control room.

The planet’s gravity begins pulling at the ship, and they’re in orbit in less than a minute, Virgo almost catches his fearful breath looking at deep purple and blue swirls across the planet’s surface. He makes a note to find out what this place is called later, when they’re safe. If they’re safe. He tries not to think of things he heard of happening in Astarum prisons. He wonders what they’re even being chased for now, while they have a second to think about it, but he doesn’t have long, because he’s watching Scope then, as he tries not to break down, as he stares straight ahead with his eyes just a little up to catch the tears and try to banish whatever keeps flickering behind his eyes. 

Virgo has to stop himself from asking if Scope’s alright. Obviously not, insensitive to ask right now when there’s no option for either of them or any of the people on the ship to be alright until it’s over. He doesn’t have long to beat himself up about not knowing how to help, though.

The first missile, Virgo can’t figure out what it is,  a fiery projectile aimed seemingly directly at the planet, he assumes it’s a tiny asteroid or something. Then the second one flies by the viewing panels much closer and he can almost make out the Astarum insignia on its side, a dark swan pierced through the breast by a sword on a field of pure white.

His heart jumps to his throat and it feels so tight and agonizing there that Virgo is convinced he’s not breathing for a number of full seconds before Scope’s nodding, trying to bolster the courage to ask how close they are before he does. 

“Cliptic, report,” he says into the comm, quiet, ragged. 

“We are not really going anywhere, Scope, please tell me you have a plan and this is not an emergency.” 

“You can see the engine’s fine, this is an emergency but I have a plan,” Scope says, then pauses, with a short small ghost of the laugh he usually laughs, “Virgo’s got a plan. Tell me when they’re close.” 

“They stopped on the other side I believe they are waiting for us to come back around,” Cliptic immediately responds through the static. 

“Alright, keep holding on,” Scope orders softly and then glides himself over to the lightspeed array again, and waits. Their dash suddenly lights up with “incoming message” and Virgo makes a sound of surprise. 

“They want to parle so they can get back what we had,” Scope says, hitting decline message without looking at it, “We don’t have it anymore, soon as they know that we’re dead.” 

Virgo tries to imagine what would be important enough to launch an interstellar chase for, and watches Scope wait, eyes on the gas planet’s horizon.  They round the edge of orbit and there they are, looking face-first at hundreds upon hundreds of medium-sized Peacekeepers usually used for patrols or, well, search sweeps like this one. They’re shaped not unlike paper cranes without necks, with rows heavy gun-like shooters on either wing, as soon as they round the corner all of those shooters are fixed on Precarious.

And doubly as quick as it came around the corner, the tiny D-Class ship jumps like a frog into water, back into lightspeed, taking a few quick turns to make it through the nexus of ships which had all stopped behind them, Precarious leaves them in stardust with not a single chance of catching up again. 


	5. Seconds Long

Precarious sets a course for a nearby inner planet of a star system only a few minutes’ travel from the purple gas giant they’d used to stage an escape. 

The entire flight, Scope keeps his eyes fixed firmly in front of him, and checks every thirty seconds with Cliptic that she can’t see anything following them, running constant sweep’s with the ship’s search technology and looking, generally, something of a well put together mess. 

Virgo hasn’t heard of this one; they’ve looped back from their exploits into the disconnected Astarum territory that lies separated from the rest of the galactic bodies under the Astarum’s control by a mass swath of celestial mass conquered during this century-long war, by the CCA. 

As they bare down on the small planet, covered in long, string-like clouds that stretch across its atmosphere like a loom ready to work, Virgo scowls a little. 

“Is it wise to seek shelter from the Astarum on an Astarum-controlled planet?” 

“Cereus is only Astarum-controlled in name, same as Cavan,” Scope murmurs, “And we’re not seeking shelter; we’re here for supplies.”

“Supplies,” repeats Virgo, incredulous. 

“Fuel, mostly, and ammunition in case we need it,” Scope says, and as they break atmosphere something in his jaw hardens. The readability of Scope’s fear drops and suddenly it feels like there’s a blank screen in front of Virgo, humming with black glow and static but nothing more. Cosmic background radiation. 

“We’re going back to get Liana,” Virgo says, and Scope just nods. 

“And Devon,” adds Scope. 

Virgo sighs, heavy, tired. 

“This wasn’t what I signed up for,” he mumbles. 

“You want us to leave you on Cereus?” returns Scope, without so much as making eye contact. 

“No.” Virgo isn’t sure why he says it. Cereus would be far enough away, a whole swath of CCA galaxy away, from Cavan to disappear and never be seen from again. 

But some part of him thinks he hasn’t seen enough, being chased by Astarum Peacekeepers isn’t enough. Seeing only Pasmore and Cereus and that nameless anonymous planet in the middle of the open galaxy was not enough. There is more to do. There’s more to see. And Precarious has become the avenue to do it through. 

“I want to see where this goes,” admits Virgo.

Scope laughs then, a real laugh. 

“Am I wrong for taking that as a compliment?” he asks, he still doesn’t look at Virgo but his tone lightens a little. 

Virgo doesn’t answer him. 

“What’s Cereus like?” he asks, leaning one elbow on the back of Scope’s chair. 

“A lot of it’s emptier than the ocean on your planet.” 

As Precarious breaks the atmospheric tapestry on the small planet, a huge rolling supercontinent can be seen, with low mountains partially rounded at their summits from age and weather. Even from just under the high-hanging clouds, Virgo can see to the west of the continent extends an emerald green rolling field which seems to go on for more land than he’s seen in his entire life, and to the east of that, broken by a crest of mountains, the continent splinters into archipelago and island, deep rainforest clustering in some of these islands closer to the equatorial center, other places it seems to be brown and green mottled; swamp or something foreign to Virgo he can’t place from this far away. 

They head for the far coast of the rolling prairie, where massive cliffs drop off into the mostly still ocean beneath. As they descend, they approach the ocean, not the singular city lit by the midmorning sun that Virgo has been able to discern. It’s a city smaller than Viltir or Parvaine, but still big, the size of Cavan’s second biggest, Deltir, or just a little smaller. It stretches along the edge of prairie bordering the cliff like branching sea star, arms extending out into the grass that Virgo can see as they get closer is almost tall as a man. 

They turn as they get closer to the ocean, back to face the cliff and Scope lands them gently in an alcove of the cliff that’s home to a few F-Class and D-Class vessels which look even older than Precarious itself. It only  takes a few minutes of comm conversation with a port supervisor to get them checked into a database of starships on-world, Precarious has been here before or they would have barred landing.

Scope and Virgo meet the others in the cargo hold, all nervous, all silent upon meeting. Dane and Scope lower the door as quickly as possible, and once they’re all out, close and lock it similarly swiftly. Scope directs Dane to find fuel, and Cliptic and Virgo to find ammunition, allotting each a small bag of Astarum general currency gold dollars and a few Cerean kikavs for side-dealings if necessary. He then disappears, citing a need to get something and get it privately.

Cliptic watches him go with sad eyes, but leads Virgo through deep tunnels in the cliff without further explanation to why she looks as she does.  The path around them is lit by lines of light set into the walkway, it feels like entering the belly of the beast even if Virgo can feel the path taking a sharp incline, and leading them toward the surface, after a turn to the left they can see daylight, and they exit out onto a quiet street which is bathed in yellow milky light, yellower than Cavan’s sun, cast from a pair of sister suns, one hanging smaller, farther from Cereus, the other closerby, the morning light feels like stepping into a movie made a thousand years ago when terraforming was new and seemingly flawless. Back on a planet humanity forgot the coordinates to six hundred years ago. Virgo’s only seen clips of those movies, school friends craning over archived internet files from eras long forgotten in groups who found the bits and ancient pieces of a digital society, nonsensical phrases repeated and videos of young people who didn’t look all that different than those now, bathed in yellow light, a few seconds long at most, probably pieces of bigger things that made more sense, removed permanently from context. 

This planet, though, is the same yellow light, like gold from its sister stars, and under it Cliptic’s hair looks like starlight made palpable, his own skin seems to shine like brass, Virgo is for a moment struck breathless by the feeling of stepping into a painting, as the street that unfolds before him carries only a few hovercraft, all docked and old, most dusty or rusting. Old wheeled automobiles creep up and down a sleepy street of buildings that look like they never saw the era of star travel. 

“The Astarum terraformed Cereus three hundred years ago, during its first push further into the galaxy than the Initial Expansion,” Cliptic explains, “Once they left settlers they left, they have hardly had contact with this planet since. The technology they gain is only what they can scrounge from surrounding planets. This is much like what the Orion Emissary Territory looks like. There are many planets in the galaxy that live and die without ever seeing an A-Class starship.” 

Virgo blinks, stunned, still trying to affirm reality. The cement under their feet is unlit, and ancient thick-poled streetlights dot the street with flickering outdated bulbs that still haven’t turned off in response to the morning light. 

The air smells of fuel and unfiltered raincloud, a planet that still runs on the dirtying fuel sources that have killed terraform projects in shorter times than three hundred years. 

“I don’t know if we’ll be able to find the right fuel here,” says Virgo, quietly, eyes still trying to take in as much of the street as he can. It’s a museum in motion, a quiet respite from lightspeed travel. 

“We will, there are things sold here that you would not expect, Virgo, you should know that of any place where so many humans congregate. The Icarus Institute has a nearby established territory, they assure that travellers are not left stranded here. And they can be silent.” 

Virgo nods, twisting his fingers together nervously and sighing but following her nonetheless. He’s starting to feel the initial fear of imminent death fade, and some deep core of him feels exhausted, but not in a physical way. It feels like the universe is too huge for him to know half as much as it seems everyone around him knows. 

Cliptic catches an unmanned taxi at a taxi stop on the corner, leaning over the backseat console to punch in the coordinates of a location far along one of the starfish arms of the curving city streets lined with rowhouses and small businesses almost indistinguishable from residences themselves. 

The trip across the city takes only twenty minutes, and the few people Virgo sees are all wearing fashion that went out of style before Precarious was put together, except for a small group of interstellar travellers they pass window shopping not far from the port. 

It all feels very unreal, like Virgo’s fallen asleep in the control room. He asks Cliptic a few times if this planet is real and she laughs under her breath and assures him it is. They grow closer on the plotted course and Virgo realises he’s alone with her for the first time in a little while. 

“How long did you and Scope fight together?” he asks, with a little more clarity but his eyes are still fixed mistily out the window. 

“Only a few months, I was still new when we escaped,” says Cliptic, keeping her eyes off Virgo. 

“Why did you and him leave the fleet?” 

“Liana knew that we would not survive the punishments for failing our mission, so we left. And never went back,” Cliptic says, with a measured tone. Virgo stays quiet for the rest of the ride, trying not to push his luck. 

The building they stop at looks just as residential as any other along the neighborhood street. Another “dog” barks from one yard across the way. Virgo feels very out of place. Like a time traveller from a novel. Like a Cavani aristocrat on a poor and failing terraform lightyears from home. The air is of a different quality here, the amount of breath he gets per inhale is unreal. And the sun, it still just feels so incorrect. So out of every instinct Virgo’s every had and every lesson he’s ever learned about the way of the world.

Glancing over at Cliptic as she approaches the door his eyes slip subtly over the tattoos of constellations against her neck and the metal jewelry in her face, atypical for a doctor but not for a citizen of the Astarum. She brings into focus an acute pain at the missing of a girl Virgo grew up with, but she feels out of place, too, from a different era, from a different world.

He’d never have dreamed of climbing the stairs to a wraparound porch and watching as a girl he grew up with knocked on the door of a man who’d sell them ammunition for defense against an interplanetary war it was becoming increasingly evident no one wanted to be caught up in anyway. 

Cliptic has something sadder in her eyes than Echo, despite being a few years younger, too. There’s something different. Something small and broken. 

Virgo tries not to think about it. He stays quiet while they buy ammunition they don’t see but have scheduled to be delivered to the ship from a man with gaunt features and long, dark fingers, a scar across his face not unlike Scope’s that stands out against dark skin like the ash that collects on his fingertips from the tobacco pipe he smokes the entire visit. The borders of space within his house are defined by slowly pluming clouds of smoke, silver curtains suspended in the air, like he’s been a fire burning, billowing smoke as long as Cereus has been here. 

Cliptic seems vaguely familiar with him, but awkward, and Virgo spends most the visit staring at a statue of a whale mounted on a bookshelf barely visible through eddies in the smoke, carved of labradorite, deep blue fading into light blue near the dorsal and into brown and gold and green near the tail, like a nebula or an ocean. It sits suspended on wooden pegs from a wooden base, mid-breach. 

He disappears into the navigation dome with the pillow from his bed and the guidebook once they return from the deal. They don’t stop to look in any shops. They speak little on the return trip. He tries to be okay with not knowing what’s going on, throwing himself into faraway worlds where trees like no trees he’s ever seen grow toward the sky not twisted by sea winds, where people live without worrying about interstellar war, where new worlds are terraformed out on the fringes every day. 

Scope returns late into the evening, when the yellow sun has sunk in a beautiful array of pinks and purples and blues and oranges and bright golds. If Virgo weren’t struck the feeling of impending doom that haunts him to the core he’d find it beautiful. Now he finds it fittingly ironic, like most good philosophically minded people might. 

* * *

Solomon Synchovich is a wholly human friend of Selah’s, but this does not mean he’s not going to watch her slowly making her way up to the front desk of the Guild’s registration offices slowly after taking a number like the rest of the patrons. He tells himself that this is because he honors deeply the bureaucratic ideals of the Guild’s registration process and  that they’re very very busy, but part of him tells him that he is most definitely watching her get more and more bored in the massive waiting room for his own selfish amusement. He truly loves her as a friend, but the way she gets when she’s impatient is deeply amusing to Solomon. He likes inciting small reactions. He’s always been the type to subtly enjoy it.

He is not the one sitting at one of the row of eight windows looking out onto the waiting room, he’s tucked away in a corner cubicle with an entirely unique setup. He’s actually busy, or he should be; he’s finished most of his work today like most days, but has stayed late simply to have something to do. The office runs all night, but he’s only required to be here eight of the eleven he usually sinks into a small box with a pair of monitors and a few of the Guild’s best computers. 

Most of the time, he makes sure that the Guild’s information remains as secure and accessible as it claims it always will, especially here on Pasmore where thousands of ships dock and depart from a single port every day. Some of the time he does other, “less important things”, more political, less public.

Today, though, Pasmore’s office is busy. The recent appearance of Astarum ships means war for many people and those not off to enlist and wishing to get guild certification are those registering private ships to flee the planet for one who’s seen Astarum activity less. The people on Pasmore have been waiting half a century for the war to come to them, they’ve been ready to run at the drop of the hat and Solomon almost feels half the city has up to evacuate after the appearance of a few peacekeepers. Peacekeepers Solomon figures weren’t even here to start a war effort.

Although, it was a poor move. One the Astarum will probably pay for, Solomon thinks.

He goes about doing some extra work for the nice middle aged woman who currently has control of the corner window. They’ve worked together for a decade, since Solomon was twenty and her barely thirty-five, and he can’t for the life of him remember her name. He always forgets to check her little placard, too.

He likes doing her paperwork for her, though. She seems like she works too hard, and the deepening wrinkles in her face mean the Guild will likely move her out of a customer-direct-contact role soon enough, even though Solomon knows it’s her favorite part of the job. The way the Guild treats women is archaic, Solomon has always disagreed. He hopes she has a few more years of quietly making the complex process of registering a starship easier for people. She’s excellent at it. A born-Pasmoran with a special kind of kindness only the most busy of planets seemed to get, quick and efficient but still compassionate.

He watches her work while casting glances back to Selah, tapping the toe of a long lace-up boot on the tile floor. If he were a different man he might have courted this woman whose name he can’t remember. If he were a different man. He’s been thinking about a lot of things like this lately. He tries not to think of getting old; some men can live a hundred and fifty years nowadays, more if they’re careful, he has some forty years before becoming ancient anyway. 

Selah reaches the desk and asks to come back and as always, the woman begrudgingly allows her back into the cubicle area and she leans over Solomon’s desk, scowling a scowl that only her almost-human face can scowl. Solomon offers a diplomatic smile in return. 

“How can I help you today, ma’am?” asks Solomon, cheery tone masking an Astarum accent with an expert edge he’s honed for a decade now.

“We can’t talk here, today was not a good day to keep me waiting, Sink,” growls Selah, her expression not improving. 

“Okay, okay, let me finish this, sit down,” he concedes. She shakes her head. 

“Now.”

Solomon casts an apologetic glance at the woman at the desk who’s been watching them out of the corner of her eye and shrugs, gesturing at Selah. Selah sighs and starts shoving the things she knows Solomon will take off of his desk into the shoulder bag hanging off the back of his chair. He sighs and puts on the jacket also on the back of his chair, leaning over to log his accounts out and shut the system down. 

“What’s going on?” Solomon asks as soon as they’re onto the glittering black alley that the back of the Guild registration building opens onto. He slips a hand into his breast pocket to pull out a pack of Warwicks, Pasmore’s own tobacco subspecies tastes somewhat stale and is expensive, but Warwicks are from an inner planet, warmer, wetter, with winters which don’t come so harsh as they do on Pasmore, and especially within its populated reaches. 

“I was hacked,” Selah says, with something between anger and shame in her convincing but artificial voice. 

“You,” Solomon looks at her with disbelief as he lights his cigarette, “were hacked.” 

“I wasn’t aware you were connection-compatable,” he continues.

“I wasn’t either, but something made me black out kind of, but not all the way, I could hear, just not move,” she says, there is a hint of panic there now, too. Solomon furrows his brow.

“Huh.” 

“Huh is all you have to say? There’s a person missing because of this!” 

“You didn’t mention that there was a person missing,” Solomon says, staring blankly at her panicked face, her trembling fingers, “Just let me take care of it.” He runs his hands through thick dark hair, loosening it from his working ponytail to fall around his shoulders. The jewelry woven in hangs looser now. She gently reaches out and tugs on one now-loose loc of hair. 

“Let me explain it all first before you run off and run your shadowshow of magicking problems out of the way, okay?” she asks, her voice still trembling a little. If he were a different man. He blows a small cloud of smoke into her face, which she scrunches her nose at.

“Fine,” he concedes.

It takes a little under thirty minutes to get back to Solomon’s tiny fourteenth floor apartment and settled around his coffee table in the glow of the little hand-built computer-unit Solomon made specifically to help upkeep Selah’s programming should it need maintenance. With the correct cords hooked into tiny ports under her jaw, Solomon sifts through the data she saved of the incident for the next hour. 

It doesn’t make sense. It’s not that Selah’s so advanced she should be immune to attacks of this type that would easily work on later models of the same type of android, it’s that her programming should be too rudimentary to allow for the kind of intricate aggressive attack on a system that this is. Someone isn’t using the standard of technology; this isn’t Astarum. If it is, the Astarum has been developing some things they haven’t told people about. 

Which, all things told, Solomon doesn’t find surprising. 

He settles back on the sagging couch, loosening his tie and taking the jewelry out of his hair, dropping it into a tray on the coffee table before pulling an ashtray beside it closer to him and lighting a cigarette. He offers Selah one and she shakes her head. He knows she can smoke. She usually refuses to on basis of appearance despite the fact it’d hold next to no health risk for her and wouldn’t likely damage her circuitry. 

Solomon sighs, setting the small handheld computer unit down on the table beside the ashtray, ashing absentmindedly against the porcelain. Half-obscured by ash the bottom of the ashtray is decorated with a skeletal hand, a cigarette between two fingers. Under it there is a phrase in the language of Orion; descaven destil, ed iva vasellet. “Death is welcomed when it comes.” Solomon forgets how long he’s had the thing. He focuses on it. Thinking about he never thought he’d be here at thirty years old, he thought he’d be in the ranks of men on religious pilgrimage for Orion’s Emissaries, searching the galaxy for the moment when he’d meet death and live. 

Solomon did not think he’d be staring into the face of an artificial woman who, if he were a different man he could have grown to love over the years. What would his father think?

“What are you thinking, Sink?” Selah asks. Her eyes are dark and imploringly imprisoned in a programmed innocence, modeled after the few remaining photos from an Asiatic country on the Forefather Earth, that although being echoes of a past era still seem to be pillars of beauty in some fetishistic circles of the galaxy. 

She was not made for a good purpose. She is the type of woman men are meant to incidentally fall in love with. Solomon’s no longer fooled by the programmed innocence. She’s calculating twice as much as he is behind big dark eyes. 

“I’m thinking that this is a lot more than I wanted to be mixed up in,” sighs Solomon, “This ‘hack’, interstellar activism with you, this deal you made with Liana Doste, a known deserter of the Astarum, all of the risks you’ve been dragging me into.”

“Dragging!” Selah exclaims, “Like you haven’t been just as implicit in half the things we’ve done. Just because I make decisions sometimes doesn’t mean you haven’t brought things to me, we both know the New Sahina thing was all you.” She holds the ‘l’ in ‘all’ for far longer than necessary. Solomon measures her eyes with his own just as dark ones, two sets of irises so dark they don’t show the black holes at their centers meet one another level for a very long moment, like between the robot and the human they’re trying to communicate some need for collaboration but an obvious impasse is obstructing them. 

“I need to just, this is too much for me,” he mutters, after they’re done staring at each other stubbornly.

“You signed up to be a part of the war underneath the war when you first got me Daev Kashek’s passwords,” Selah says, glaring. He stares at her blankly and shakes his head, taking along drag off of his cigarette.

“I don’t know who did this,” he says, “I don’t have any tracking information. I hate to say it but I think your guy’s gone. I’ll keep my feelers out but as it stands, you should get out of here, please. For your own safety.” 

Selah’s glare doesn’t falter, but she gives him a single resolute nod. He gently reaches out for a Pasmoran sign of affection, his fingers except the pointer and middle curled into his hand, he lets them sit, fingertips toward her relaxed in the air for a moment before she grudgingly relaxes and reaches her own hand out in similar formation and links their fingers. 

“Come to me before you leave and I’ll give you a commline.”

“Legal?”

“Fuck no,” Solomon snorts. He beckons her out. As she leaves he sighs a sigh of one part relief and one part knowledge he won’t have time to catch his breath for a very long time if things are quite as serious as he thinks.

One doesn’t steal the original copies of the Astarum’s plan for the Initial Expansion, kept secret and archived for a thousand years, without stirring things up a little. Kicking the hornets’ nest is an understatement. And this changes things. This makes the Astarum seem vulnerable.

Solomon doesn’t like the turn this war is quickly taking. He hasn’t liked the way this war’s been turning since he was old enough to form an opinion. 

He sits down at one of his home computer units, and speaks to it in a soft voice. 

“I wonder if you’re as worried as I am.”

A quiet mechanical vaguely masculine voice responds.

“I cannot feel worry. I do not see things going in a direction you would deem good.” 

“Me neither man,” Solomon laughs. 


	6. Visiting The Saints

Scope returns to Precarious with swear words of a hundred separate planets on his lips, frustration coming off of him like waves lapping the shore of Viltir. He looks more sour than he’s looked in a long time. 

“What’s wrong?” Virgo asks, as he pads over quietly after lowering himself down the ladder from the navdome. 

“Liana got word to me,” Scope mutters after a long time, “She got a comm through at the Cereus relay center. She’s in hiding on Pasmore. She wants us to pick up a passenger from the Saints and return to Precarious’ home dock to await further orders.” 

Virgo leans gingerly against the command console, his face showing plainly his concern.

“We’re just going to leave her there?” he asks. He may not know her, but the way Scope and Cliptic treat her, almost maternally, there’s no way she’s not more important to Precarious than Virgo can even imagine. 

Scope glares out the front of the ship, out at the Cerean sky slowly darkening to indigo, white fire pinpricks alighting in the distance.

“Captain’s orders,” he says through gritted teeth, “I don’t fucking like it either.” 

“You don’t seem like you do,” Virgo says, trying to sound comforting. He doesn’t know what to say. Scope just looks at him, vaguely annoyed, and then glares back at the controls. The silence between them feels solid.

“You know why we left the military, Virgo? Me, and Cliptic, and Liana?” he says after the silence begins to feel choking. Virgo thinks back to standing with Cliptic, looking at her face as her eyes went distant when he asked. He shakes his head, but doesn’t look at Scope.

“Because three years ago, Liana’s commanding officer came to her and I, and this man, this monster, put down on the table between us,” Scope looks away too, sighing a sigh between anger and exhaustion, “A piece of paper detailing the enslavement of an entire CCA planet, and told us, on behalf of the Astarum fleet that what was on that paper was what we were required to do.” Virgo’s blood goes cold and he stares at Scope, disbelieving and with a growing defensiveness of his home nation, but stays quiet.

“We were supposed to do it with a three man crew,” continues Scope, “A captain, a pilot, and a medic, were supposed to deliver and deploy a device which would return that planet’s atmosphere to the state of its being prior to terraform, and we were to threaten to activate it should the entire planet not submit. We deployed it in deep space and failed the mission. Dropped the only ship I’d ever loved on a junk planet and picked up this antiquated mess. She’s called The Precarious Escape, in full.” 

“When we took her we vowed we’d never let a person within our power fall to the hands of a slave-trading mass-murdering empire, and we’d never let them define our lives again,” Scope says, still staring vacantly, “To leave her there is to break that vow.” 

“Are you saying we’re going to break her orders?” Virgo asks, finally, biting his tongue to not argue that the Astarum publicly denounces slavery; they would never do something like conquer planets like that. 

“I haven’t decided,” Scope mutters, shaking his head. He sighs, scrubbing both hands across his face before leaning forward in his chair and navigating Precarious into a horizontal position. 

“Either way, we’re going to the Saints,” he says, and then through the commbox to Cliptic and Dane, “Are you two ready for takeoff? Any word from Devon yet?” 

There are a long few moments of staticky silence in which Scope’s tired brown eyes meet Virgo’s hazel ones, and Virgo can see a look of exhausted worry and pain flicker through them before Cliptic responds. It makes him feel a little sick to see it hidden like that.

“We are both ready for takeoff, and I have not heard from Devon but I am talking to a Starship Guild worker who has had a report of him. I will keep you updated,” she responds.

Scope sighs in relief. 

“Thanks, Clip.” 

“You’re welcome, Walter.” 

Scope clicks the commbox to “off” and starts the procedure for ascent. Virgo stands up fully again, letting Scope’s chair spring back from his weight. He takes a step back from the control panel while Scope sets Precarious rolling, and then into takeoff across the ocean and back over Cereus’ rolling prairie. Scope looks at the land falling away underneath them like a man who’s saying goodbye to his own home and it’s in this moment that it strikes him, this is where Scope is from, and with the way things are going, this might be the last time he sees this planet. Virgo wonders how many times Scope has taken off from this cliff-bound starport and known it might be the last time he’ll return. He makes a mental note to go everywhere he loved next time he’s on Cavan. If he ever makes it back. He doesn’t want to forget the way the whales breach and sing in Viltir’s harbor, or the way the beaches in Deltir clatter with shells when you walk on them, sending small sand crabs skittering to safety. 

He takes another step back. 

“Where are you going?” Scope asks, and Virgo jumps. He notices the nervous look Virgo gives him and quickly softens his tone, “Sorry, I just.” 

The words hang between them like hung on a string stretched from one to the other, solid but flimsy. 

“Get us a course to Saint Averynn, then come back down here, okay?” there’s something in Scope’s voice that’s more vulnerable than Virgo’s ever heard from him. It’s quiet and reminds him of the way Scope looked so close to breaking as they fled Pasmore. He nods silently and ascends the ladder, his eyes catching on Scope’s with a jump in his chest.

Virgo’s heart won’t stop pounding as his fingers shake over the few cards he has detailing the territories controlled by Orion’s Emissaries. He wants to blame it on the nerves, Virgo’s not used to breaking the law, quite the opposite, he wants to say his breath comes almost ragged in his mouth because he’s scared the Astarum will find him and because he’s out of water, now, literally, because this is all so new and different.

But the fact of the matter, Virgo realizes as they break the Cerean atmosphere, is that here, in deep dark and open outer space, in vast nothing on a ship that time should have seen abandoned on an outer planet, living on borrowed time with a handful of people running away from their pasts, is something he never made or found in the empty halls of his mother’s Cavani keep; a home. This is a place to belong, and despite the Astarum likely on their tail, he can’t help but think that somehow they’ll escape whatever monsters chase them across the stars.

It’s not fear that makes his fingers shake, sliding a Navcard into the astronavigator. It’s something he wants to deny with every descent Cavani bone in his body, it’s an offense second only to killing a whale, punishable on his home planet more severely than manslaughter; this makes his throat close on the feeling. His stomach turns, but his brain still feels stuck somewhere between an atmospheric high and being completely absent. They hit lightspeed and it feels like he leaves his stomach back in orbit.

Virgo can only just barely focus on the path the astronavigator gives him back through the Cacophony enough to chose to go around instead; his brain keeps retracing the way Scope looked at him, desperate in some tiny portion to not be alone, and within that; desperate for Virgo to stay. He tries to quell the thought, but his heart keeps jumping in his chest and bringing back the thought of soft brown eyes, full of too much for a man not yet close to thirty, how the pale jagged scar across his cheek falls from just under his cheekbone into a mouth usually held lips-just-parted in focus. He shakes the thought from his head. “There’s a lot to be said for keeping one’s thoughts clear,” he remembers his mother telling him, when he confessed the crime in secret to her, “Just try not to think about it, dear. It won’t be an issue one day.”

Is it an issue now? He thinks, and then he catches himself, of course it is. Everything his mother said was “one day” was a gentle way of saying “never”. He goes from a giddy excitement making his heartbeat skip to something else, the beginnings of a twisting dread and guilt in his stomach. Of course it’s an issue. His thoughts spiral.

He doesn’t realize he’s crying until Scope appears at the top of the ladder, blue hair falling into concerned brown eyes, brows knit close and soft words on his lips. Only then does Virgo realize the hot wet feeling on his cheeks, and only then is he made keenly aware of the acute tightness in his throat. 

“What’s wrong?” he asks, approaching the place where Virgo’s lowered himself to his knees to mess with some dials at the bottom of the astronavigator, bringing another portion of route into focus to manually check it. Virgo just shakes his head, he raises the sleeve of the jacket they bought back on Pasmore to pat at his eyes before going wordlessly back to work.

“Talk to me,” half-pleads Scope, crouching beside him. Virgo shakes his head again, more insistent. 

“Nothing dangerous, no secrets, won’t get anyone killed,” he mumbles, a feeble attempt at reassuring, he hopes it’s true. 

Scope sighs, and looks at the projected map hanging inside the navdome above their heads and around them. 

“Are we safe to autopilot for half an hour?” 

Virgo nods, sniffling and patting at his eyes again, trying to force the tears to stop coming now that the line of thought bringing them’s been interrupted, but the feeling of guilt doesn’t leave his gut and they won’t stop falling.

Scope lifts himself to his feet and offers Virgo a hand up, which he refuses. The pilot leads them back down the ladder and into the lounge, then into the room to one side of Virgo’s, pushed against one edge of the ship and with an entrance onto the crew lounge. He unlocks the door with a key off the ring of them at his belt and Virgo takes a deep breath, looking cautiously into Scope’s room. 

It smells stronger of tobacco smoke than Scope himself, and is darker than the other rooms on board, seems to be lit by a single standing light in the corner attempting to mimic the weak yellow light of Cereus’ sun. His bed is unmade, the room itself an untidy cacophony of knicknacks and different useful things from around the galaxy. Virgo recognizes mementos and coins from a few planets, but most seem foreign to him. Just above his bed is a bulls-eye window, and next to his bed a low-hanging round chair which has a jacket tossed onto the back and a few discarded shirts nested inside of it. Opposite the bed and chair, a tiny television screen which seems centuries old, and looks like it might actually be built into the ship itself, hooked to a number of technological boxes Virgo understands must at least some be for recreational gaming, but others look official; like partial flight simulator boxes Virgo’s seen. 

Scope settles on his bed after tossing the shirts out of the chair for Virgo and closing the door. He pulls an ashtray from the tiny table shoved beside his bed and pulls a pack of cigarettes from the drawer in the same table, tapping one out against the corner and fitting it between his lips. Virgo doesn’t watch too carefully. The tears have slowed a little, for that he’s greatful. He’s going to think this is very embarrassing once he’s pulled himself from the emotional plunge, and be mortified he let Scope see it. 

“Talk to me, fledge,” Scope says, offering the pack to Virgo. Virgo tentatively takes a cigarette. 

“No thanks,” he mumbles, putting it between his teeth and taking the metal lighter Scope hands him after lighting his own cigarette. 

“Aren’t ships required to have smoke detectors?” 

“Nothing saying they can’t be disabled for a designated smoking area on-board, long as that area is rigged with separate airflow,” Scope returns with a smirk, then watches Virgo take a novice drag off the cigarette and immediately loose the smoke from his lips. 

“Have you ever smoked a cigarette before?” he asks, snorting.

“Tobacco grows everywhere on Cavan, we have an aquatic variety, very prolific,” Virgo responds sarcastically, and immediately feels a little better when Scope laughs.

“Inhale all the way, not just into your mouth,” he says, reaching out across the gap between them, a hand sinking into Virgo’s hair to ruffle it before quickly retreating. Virgo tries and coughs hard, glaring up at Scope, who just shrugs and laughs again. Virgo is suddenly aware how close their knees are to touching and tries not to look.

He gets the hang of smoking by the end of the cigarette, and he’s stopped crying entirely by halfway through. Scope talks to him in a soft voice the entire time, saying nothing really. The tobacco makes Virgo’s head spin and his lips feel light and tingly, he’s lightheaded once he’s finished and leans back in the chair, letting his head fall back so he can stare at the ceiling. He laughs and is surprised to find glow in the dark stick-on stars above him. 

“You have a whole galaxy out there,” Virgo laughs, disbelief coloring his voice, “And you put the fake ones up there?” 

“Every room I’ve ever had has had those in it,” Scope says, totally serious, “Not like you just leave behind being a kid when you run off to fly spaceships.” 

“Aren’t you supposed to?” Virgo asks, genuine, not judging. He turns his chin down to meet Scope’s eyes again and shivers as they try to look through him to his core.

“You’re supposed to do a lot of things, I guess,” Scope says, something faraway touching his voice, as he breaks the eye contact and looks at the wall. 

“You were supposed to do a lot of things,” Virgo says after a long half-comfortable pause, not accusatory, simple; matter of the fact. Scope meets his eyes again but there’s something impalpable between them now, Scope is somewhere else. 

“So were you,” he murmurs. Virgo nods. They hold each others’ gaze in silence, two statues in a ghost town, left with nothing but one another to see; it’s an incidental, quietly powerful thing that passes between them. A small pact, an understanding. In a few seconds, the position they hold with one another changes, the clarity shifts.

It happens in between seconds, faster than the speed of light. Still, neither of them moves, some part of Virgo is deeply scared that if he does he’ll break the illusion that an understanding has been reached. 

He feels the end of the moment setting in before Scope opens his mouth, commits it to memory.

“You didn’t know the Astarum held slaves, earlier, you looked shocked,” he says, breaking eye contact, something about the set of his mouth says he feels uncomfortable bringing this up. 

“They persecute slave owners, it’s one of the few offenses the Astarum approves a death penalty for,” Virgo says, glancing down at his hands. He twists his gold puzzle ring around his thumb nervously.

“Yeah, they don’t like private slave owners, military slaves are fine,” Scope says, with a sigh, he lays back on his bed, spread eagle, “This ship’s been working to free military slaves and help get refugees out of the war zone for a while, year or two at least.” 

That puts things in place for Virgo. It isn’t a massive revelation, a surprise but not so surprising he might not have expected any passenger of this ship might be illegal at any time.

He nods.

“You do other things too,” he assumes.

“Yeah, mostly just supply runs for failed terraforms in the warzone and other planets that get hit too hard, that kind of thing, we support the poor before we do jobs for the rich but sometimes we have to to keep costs down,” Scope explains, “We do run passenger runs sometimes, too. If the money’s good enough. Jackson, for example, he’s a real passenger, he pays us pretty frequently to get him discreetly from wherever he is to wherever we’re going.”

Scope sits up to look at Virgo like he’s awaiting approval, concerned. Virgo looks back with a matching concern.

“I won’t tell anyone if you don’t kick me off on the next planet we hit?” Virgo asks, then adds half-jokingly, “I don’t want to be sacrificed on the Saints.” 

Scope’s face relaxes, he falls back into the comfortable mask of confidence. 

“You’re worth too much as a navigator, and the Saint’s don’t do the sacrifice thing anyway.” 

Virgo bites his lip nervously but relaxes a little, too. Scope lights another cigarette, eyes fixed on Virgo again. 

“Tell me about Cavan,” he says, breaking another short silence. Virgo’s slowly realizing that Scope has picked up on his need to be prompted to speak most times; Scope’s paying attention to him in an unfamiliar way and Virgo’s not sure whether to be happy about that or not. 

“What do you want to know?” he asks, bringing one knee up to rest his chin on as he breaks the gaze to look at the opposing wall. To the side of the screen there’s a tapestry of the sea-cliffs at Cereus’ western continental border hanging on the wall, it begins to move as Scope flicks on a fan in the ceiling with a switch beside his bed. He doesn’t offer Virgo a second cigarette.

“Tell me about Viltir, I only got to see it very briefly during that woman’s funeral,” Scope says. Virgo can feel him watching as he laces his fingers around the leg he brought up.

“I grew up there, it’s a beautiful city, the disappearing city, the life city. In Vieraeban, Viltir means ‘living city’, it was the first city on Cavan, the council says it will be the last should Cavan ever fall,” Virgo says, he can’t help a small rush of pride to his voice. 

“Do you speak Vieraeban?” 

Virgo screws his face tight to concentrate for a moment and haltingly says, 

“Maseka va’ast delastan k’vin av’ad.” 

“Which means?” Scope asks with a laugh.

“My mother was more skilled,” says Virgo, “It’s a dying language, almost dead. Cavanis are proud of it though.” 

“My uncle spoke a little, he spent some time in Deltir. It sounds familiar. I wish I had the tongue for it.” 

Virgo laughs. “It’s not easy if you’re not raised trying to make the sounds. But it’s possible. I’ll teach you what I know if you’d like. Some other time, when we have less pressing things.”

Scope smiles at him, a genuine smile.

“I think I’d like that.”

“You learned the sign language the military uses, though, I don’t know that.”

“It’s not really just military, but I’ll teach you in return if you’d like,” Scope offers and Virgo smiles, enthusiastic.

“First you’re going to have to stop acting like nothing in the world’s ever been good for you, though, dang. You light up for nothing,” Scope chuckles.

Virgo snorts, letting his eyes fall to his hands again. He rubs a thumb over the scars on his knuckles and remembers faintly the question of what his appearance says about him. What untrue past he portrays with scarred knuckles and a hawked nose, nervous eyes reluctant to meet others. He wants to admit he’s had a nice life; mostly without strife, that the scarring is from searching through the shells and sand while swimming and scraping them on the reef. That he was as close to an aristocrat as Cavan had. Even if the people around him were largely cold and difficult for him to understand, he was well cared for. Instead he stays quiet.

He stays in Scope’s room, talking about Cavani custom, about the religion practiced on Cavan which Virgo considers himself at least vaguely part of, Hiitaan, religion of the whalesingers, the men who pledge their lives to live on floating villages and follow the mass pods of dolphin and whale that call Cavan home. They speak briefly of Cereus, how it has little religious leaning as a planet, but how Scope’s family had ties to Orion’s Emissaries. Virgo asks about it and he mentions only that they come from a specific sect focusing only on one deity, a deity of death, and that he knows little of the larger religion beyond what he’s heard second or thirdhand. 

Virgo excuses himself some hour and a half later to go back to plotting the course of a journey likely to take at least two days of constant travel. He tries not to think of the guilt settling in his stomach, he hasn’t done anything. 

* * *

Solomon makes himself dinner, a non-meat-based protein-substitute block and a sauce simmered from mushrooms local to the stone caverns not far from Parvaine and spices from the Saints. It takes a long time, and he banters quietly with his computer while he does, calming his nerves about what they both know is coming. Were he another man he might be less nervous.

“You should take your medication,” the computer intones as he gets up to put his dishes into the machine set into the counter. 

“I should,” he agrees. He sits down in front of the computer instead. 

“I’ll remind you later,” it hums.

“You do that.” 

Solomon settles before the screen, fingers running small spirals on his desk before he pulls up a secure relay to another member of the P:NK Starship Guild branch who contacted him a few months ago. He hasn’t responded yet. Now is as good as never.

“This is not wise,” his computer advises as he opens the last email, “You may compromise your position.” 

“I’m aware.” 

The computer remains silent as Solomon’s dark eyes trace over the few lines of text, decoding the simple message, an offer of friendship.

Instead of responding in code, Solomon responds in Mantari. He does this for one of two reasons; the code is unnecessary right now, he’s technically doing nothing illegal by any interstellar law he knows of. And this name on his screen, for some reason, strikes him as a linguist. The king of linguist who might be able to master Solomon’s tricky native tongue. 

He responds, roughly, ‘I could use friends now more than ever.’ 

He leans back in his chair, hits send, and waits for the relay to complete the connection and send the parcel of data off. 

The screen-name “elderThings” goes grey on the screen for a long moment, and then suddenly, “give me a second,” not in code pops up under the name. Solomon waits.

“This is a very high risk to possible reward ratio,” the computer intones softly.

“I know,” responds Solomon, pinching the bridge of his nose with an exhaustion he didn’t realize he had washing over him. He gets up from his computer to make himself a cup of coffee. 

It’s a rare treat on Pasmore, where the beans have to be shipped in from a neighboring star system. None of Pasmore’s system supports the correct climate for them. Solomon tells himself he needs to relax, this is as good a time as any.

Back in the Saints, most planets could grow coffee easily. It was plentiful. So plentiful it stitched itself into Solomon’s memory of childhood. He leans over the counter while it brews through the thin cloth filter, letting the scent wash over him and trying to remember how things had been before the Pink Branch, before the Starship Guild. 

It was this or dying on the battlefield, Solomon reminds himself. He sighs, discarding the coffee grounds. A rock and a hard place, always a rock and a hard place. 

He hears the message notification even though he can’t see his screen and leaves his coffee on the counter, sitting back down with a look of concentration stitching his eyebrows together and forcing his lips into a soft frown.

The response is in seemingly perfect Mantari. 

‘I’ve been watching. Devon is one of ours,’ it says, ‘I can help you get him back, and give your thief friends some asylum,’

‘Under a few conditions,’ continues a second message a few moments later.

‘I need you to do me a favor in Parvaine before you come meet me.’

Solomon stares unblinkingly at the screen and shuts down every computer process he can. He double checks the security of his connection.

‘Come meet you?’ Solomon responds. elderThings waits another long moment before responding in Mantari again.

‘You and me have a lot of work to do together. P:NK’s gone to the dogs.’

‘What kind of work?’

‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,’ is what he responds with, and then, another few moments later, ‘I’ll be in touch. For now, contact Devon’s crew. Tell them I know where he is. And tell the robot friend to relax. You all are going to be very busy very soon.’ 

elderThings goes offline. Solomon wipes his data and stare at the blank screen. 

“I don’t trust the viability of this situation,” his computer hums.

“I know,” Solomon murmurs.

“You should take your medication.”

“I know.” 

* * *

Scope lays back on his bed as the door closes behind Virgo. He lights a cigarette and stares at the glow in the dark stick-on stars on the ceiling and thinks about how scared he was of being made obsolete by a navigator. He almost laughs out loud to himself over that; the idea of Virgo taking over his job. Virgo would crash before they got out of orbit at the helm, too nervous. Too scared of criticism.

He tries to think back to when he was that nervous, his first flights on the Astarum training ships, his first time meeting Liana, the intimidating commanding officer of a small group of special operations agent, whose dark eyes looked more empty than the deep black.

He can’t remember it, not with tactile familiarity, but he sees something of himself in Virgo. And he sees something he could have been had he not seen what he’d seen. Blind faith and idealism wrapped inside a fear of the unknown. He knows logically he was like that once, but that man feels so far away from the one he is now. 

There’s a cluster of framed pictures bolted into an alcove next to his bed, which he finds his eyes wandering over as his cigarette burns down to a pillar of ash, and he tries to think of who he’d be if he had waited til twenty to see the world outside of Cereus.

It makes him ache for something which isn’t what he has, but he can’t put his finger precisely on what. 

He makes himself sit up and haul himself to standing after he finishes his cigarette, pushing his hair over to the other side and taking a deep breath. Something says Virgo is safe, something tells him he’s thought that of too many people who weren’t.

It’s been a long time since he trusted anyone who wasn’t Liana. She’s become something of a replacement for the mother he lost early. She’s become more than Walter Scope ever thought he deserved.

He gets up and goes to his relay point computer. These are technically legal until they perform relays which haven’t been cleared by the local satellite owners; non-emergency relays while off-world mostly. Logging into the relay to check the news is technically, however, illegal. Scope hasn’t much cared for the strict definitions of law since he left the military. Not much use in rules, for the most part. 

He entertains the major news outlets on Pasmore first, all of them covering the same issue; the fear of an incoming Astarum invasion, and the likelihood thereof. The mass exodus from the planet, the fear, the confusion, the way no single entity of peacekeeping on the planet can seem to keep everything under control. Scope frowns. This is both good and bad for Liana’s efforts in hiding.

He moves onto the Saints, where little has gone on besides a starship with settlers from one planet going missing. The political situation there is usually calm. Orion’s Emissaries truly seem to back up the peace and pacifism they preach with their actions. Besides the ever-growing number of terraform failures on that side of the galaxy, life seems somewhat peaceful if usually not very rich or nutritious. It’s better than can be said for a lot of the galaxy. Scope thinks briefly of the stories of atmospheric terraform failure he heard as a child, though, and reminds himself suddenly not being able to breathe on your own planet is nothing to be trifled with, and that it can kill entire cultures and species in mere moments. 

Scope sighs, clicking past to galactic front page news. Cliptic’s original research on nanobots is making the front page again as another scientist makes a discovery to expand on their usefulness and he makes a note to show her the article when they have a moment to breathe. But it’s what’s above that which Scope skips over at first, and then clicks back to because he hadn’t fully registered.

Across the front page, in dark bold text, ‘Sentient Non-human Space Travellers Contacted- Tonin’s Rule has been Disproven.’. 

Scope stares at the headline in disbelief. It doesn’t include a picture. Just the text, a link. 

He clicks through. On the next page is a long story which Scope can’t really focus on and has to click through to the end of.

Contact has barely been made yet. But there’s something out there. Something that isn’t human. Scope’s been saying this for years, that there has to be, out there, somewhere, the galaxy is too big, and the universe beyond it tenfold. 

Scope feels his fingers tingling in excitement, his knees shaking a little. He shuts down the connection and forces himself upward from the computer, half-stumbling down the hall and into the medbay.

“Cliptic,” he intones seriously, gripping her upper arms as she turns around from something she was doing at the counter, “Cliptic, there are aliens.” 

“Yes, we have talked about this before, I believe you,” she says, shaking her head and twisting out of his grasp to look back at her work, “Do you have something of worth to talk to me about Walter?” 

He grabs her again, exhaling sharply.

“The Institute has contacted them,” he says, voice stone-serious. 

Cliptic blinks back shock. 

“Oh.” 

“Yeah,” a touch of breathless excitement touches Scope’s voice. 

“Can you get back to work now? I do not believe there are any aliens on this ship.”

Scope’s face falls, but he sighs.

“Yeah, I guess,” he mutters.

“Buzz-kill,” adds Scope as he slinks out of the room. He stalks back to the control room expecting Virgo to have gone to bed already. 

Instead, he finds Virgo hanging upside down from his knees wrapped around one of the top rungs of the ladder up to the navdome. He has an intergalactic guidebook in his hands and is chewing on something thoughtfully. Scope watches from the doorway to the crew lounge stairs as the navigator brings his body up in a weird suspended curling motion, a sit-up without the ground beneath to support him. Scope swallows.

“What are you doing?” he asks, after watching Virgo repeat the process a few times. The paradox of a fledgeling crew member looks up, shocked, confused, and almost falls from his roost in surprise. Scope watches his face go red under the freckles.

“I just,” Virgo sputters as he raises himself up so he can lower himself back down to the floor, “Uh, I want to stay fit in case, in case I ever need to swim again.” 

“Uh… huh,” Scope breathes, looking over a half-breathless navigator who stands a few inches shorter than him. At the roots of his hair, Scope can see red starting to show, and it occurs to him that he didn’t even know the kid’s real hair color until it started showing a day or two ago. He doesn’t let his eyes focus on Virgo’s face and instead goes to sit down in the pilot’s seat.

“Did you hear the Institute made contact with non-human sentient life?” he asks, turning on the display at the front of the controls.

“Vak, really?” exclaims Virgo, crossing the room, resting a hand on the back of his chair. Scope isn’t sure how to feel about that. He likes the interest though, this is a big deal, and despite the fact he thought he’d probably feel more passionately when it actually happened, he’s excited.

“Really, we don’t know much about them but they’ve been talking with the Icarus Institute for a little while, I guess we have decoders figuring out the language on both sides,” Scope says, a small smile forming on his face as he takes manual control of the ship back over and catches himself up on the route Virgo’s set for them.

“I always told my mom it’d happen during my lifetime,” muses Virgo, quietly. They look out over the stars passing by them on the faint glow and Scope feels momentarily solid, like he is not a single minute transitive point in the galaxy but he is the room around them, secure and secluded from the rest of the world, he is hollow but strong.

“I always hoped it’d happen in mine,” he returns after a few moments. He watches Virgo’s hazel eyes flit across to him, catching light off the glowing controls and turning almost-green. 

“You know you never told me you were a redhead,” Scope says, chuckling, “It’s a rare enough thing these days most don’t hide it unless they’re hiding something.” He’s half-imploring, half-joking. They both know it. He watches decisions flicker over Virgo’s face.

“I don’t want to remember my family right now,” is all he says. Scope leaves it at that. He wonders vaguely what the Saints are like. It’s going to be an interesting trip, if he and Virgo keep toeing lines. Scope thinks he’s okay with that. Probably. 


	7. More Taboo Than Murder

The second morning of the trip to Saint Averynn, Dane gathers the remaining crew of Precarious; Scope, Virgo, Cliptic and himself for breakfast and serves berries he bought on Pasmore, a rare treat. For the majority of the meal they sit in unsettled silence.

“Do we know what we’re doing on Averynn?” Dane finally asks as he gathers plates.

“We’re picking up a friend of Liana’s,” Scope says, without looking up. He looks as though he’s hardly slept, the shirt he left the control room last night in expertly hidden under a dark knit sweater. Virgo watches a tension at the corner of his jaw get taut and release over and over, anxiety forcing his teeth to grind subtly and his fingers to twist with one another under the table. 

“A combat friend, I’m guessing,” Dane fills in the blank. Cliptic nods. 

“We need more fire power. That is a wise decision,” she adds.

Scope sighs. 

“I just don’t think it’s worth a trip to the Saints. There are guns for hire all over every planet between us and them.” 

“If Liana’s telling you to do it, he must be somethin’ special,” Dane hums, “How long until we hit atmosphere?” 

“Two days, could make it quicker if we can find a way through the Republic of Orion that won’t get us caught.” 

Virgo’s brain kicks into the detail of that, but he doesn’t know the Republic well enough to give an off-hand answer.

“I’d say we just pay the tolls but fuck what Orion’d do with the cash,” Dane mutters. 

“What would they do with it?” Virgo asks, piping in at an inopportune moment as usual. 

“Terraform,” Cliptic answers before either man gets a chance to, “Terraform irresponsibly so they don’t have to conquer terraformed planets for territory expansion. Terraform poorly and quickly and then let that poor terraform sit until it degrades.” 

Virgo nods swiftly, a short “ah” in response as he tells himself to just keep his mouth shut if he doesn’t want to hear about all of the awful things happening in the galaxy. 

“You and me can try to figure it out,” Scope says, eyes meeting Virgo’s. Virgo feels his stomach seize and his breath catch, but nonverbally agrees while trying to keep his composure. He’s not doing anything wrong, he hasn’t done anything wrong, he tells himself as the panic, always a second after that feeling, sets in. 

Where Scope hasn’t caught the fear before, he does this time, and spends a miniscule half second trying to silently ask what’s wrong without anyone else noticing. Something in that moment reminds Virgo of someone he used to know a long time ago, an employee of his mother’s, a priest of Hiitaan. Deep violet-dyed hair, not that different from Scope’s deep blue and all tired dark eyes just the same. Virgo thinks of sitting on the slope of Viltir’s great volcano, Javālāmukhī, watching whales breach and their massive tails sink beneath the waves like continents receding. 

As Virgo makes his way back to the navdome he wonders if he’ll ever see another whale. He grew up in shrines made of the bones of their ribs and viewing them like spirits of the ocean, of their life, like divinity manifested in a form crafted straight from the water encompassing their planet. Virgo grew up hearing “a whale killed in Viltir is more taboo than murder”, watching trials for men who hit them with fishing boats, their sentence death. 

He remembers swimming in the bay out from Viltir, feeling no different from any Viltiri citizen, slum-bound or aristocrat, as the waves washed over the bathing crowds which drew to the beaches every afternoon. He remembers the way the black whales with white eye patches would come up almost onto the beaches and bring their young to play among the city’s people, growing up beside the small whales and remembering the notches in the dorsal fins of those familiar. Most of them stopped coming to the beaches when he was fifteen or sixteen, the failure of Viltir’s initial nuclear reactor killed most of the fish around the island the city is built on then, and the whales were rare to return. Sometimes off in the distance, though, Virgo could see lines of black dorsals cresting the waves from his mother’s keep high on the slopes of Javālāmukhī. 

In Vieraeban, the name of those whales, Virgo distantly remembers, is Veldesta- the lifegiver, and some Viltiri still hold that back before any worlds were colonized, it was these whales that brought the light from the stars to the first earth, the Forefeather Earth. That the starlight marked their eyes and bellies, and that their black skin is torn from the fabric of space itself, that they were the first beings to exist, and that they will be the last.

It’s disheartening, displacing, to realize that no other corner of the galaxy would understand the way the ocean weaves itself into the faith and fearlessness of any Viltiri, to realize that no other world he’ll likely see will roll with green-blue waves the way Cavan did.

And Virgo is struck by a feeling of longing previously unfamiliar, a homesickness he’s never known. The unique feeling of being worlds away from any earth he ever called home, and not being sure he’ll ever go back. 

He catches himself slotting the inappropriate cards into the astronavigator, the cards detailing the region of stars around his home planet. And he stops himself halfway, because he realizes how silly it is, but also because the longing then acutely coalesces in his chest and he has to once more fight back tears.

It feels like he’s spent the past few days doing nothing else. This time, though, he wins the battle, manages to quell the feeling and numb his chest enough to breathe normal and feel his eyes clear. 

He sets about finding a route through Republic of Orion but quickly hits a snag; there’s a symbol in his guidebook he never understood which becomes evident all over the pages detailing the Republic of Orion and the Saints. It’s a twisted, mangled piece of metal marked with a spiral, exclamation points on either side, put under the names of a number of planets and star systems. Reading it on-world, Virgo never understood, now cross-referencing the guidebook to the Navcards he suddenly understands what it means, and why Scope didn’t ask him to find a path through the Republic in the first place.

There aren’t Navcards detailing most of the Republic, and most of the Saints, because most of the space between them and much of the space further from their political centers remains unmapped.

A quiet part of Virgo reminds him that he’s sitting on a ship housing semilegal mapping technology, that there’s a reason mapping is considered one of the better things that can be done for small, forgotten terraforms, for worlds their governments would rather write out of existence than write-off as failure. 

Another quiet part tells him what he’s thinking would be far less important than the mission they’re on, that he should keep quiet and let things happen how the people in charge want them to happen. He’s just the navigator. He shouldn’t be trying to change lives. All he wanted was to change his own; he should be satisfied.

The quiet part responds, swiftly and without emotion, that he’s not.

* * *

Liana Doste is no less beautiful than the first time Solomon met her half a decade ago, still a commanding officer in the Astarum Fleet and desperate for answers, desperate for a way to make things better for the men she sent to die every day. He remembers being slung in a low chair in the antiques shop, listening to Devon relay the day’s news feed while Solomon himself tapped away at his small computer on the beginnings of a code that would lead a revolution he’s still not fully aware the consequences of.

That day’s she’d been scared, and in many of the days since Solomon has seen her ability to modulate her own fear, but today she is terrified, and she is terrified not for herself, but like that first day, for the people who she is responsible for.

He serves her a cup of coffee and settles her in the small alcove off his living room, a reading nook in the window of his small apartment, where she looks distantly out the window with eyes that have seen more of the galaxy than Solomon could even imagine. 

“Do you ever think it might be time for you to retire?” he asks, his eyes sliding over the place where the dim Pasmoran sunlight filters through the window to lay creases in her cheeks where her eyes have been scrunched to laughing too many times or where her brow is deeply wrinkled from years of scowling. For the few moments he’s seen of Liana’s life, Solomon is certain that she’s had a long and full one, and that she’s done more than enough for the cause of lessening the suffering of those affected by the war.

She tucks her fingers thoughtfully around her mug, as though she’s considering it but shakes her head. 

“There are still too many things to be done,” she sighs, “And there are too many people to save.” 

“You’re the purest example of a hero complex I’ve ever met,” Solomon says softly, with a short laugh.

“Walter Scope,” Liana returns, with her own small laugh.

“I’ll give you that one,” he chuckles. He settles in the chair across from her. 

“So you’ll get word to them?” he confirms, and she looks at him with deep almost-black eyes that say she’s tired of being bothered on details after the past half hour of interrogation but she’ll humor him, for now. 

“I will, please stop worrying. Scope is smart. He’s going to find my gunman and return to Riziyun.” 

“Is that where the Precarious Escape goes to escape the world? Finally trust me enough to tell me where?” Solomon smirks, leaning over the back of the chair to look at Liana. She scowls softly at the joke. Displeased is a good look on her. If Solomon were a different man…

“If I were a different man I would have asked you to marry me years ago, you know?” he says, without really thinking about it.

“You hardly know me!” Liana scolds, shaking her head, “And anyway, I would have said no.”

“Of course you would have, but I would have asked,” he insists, “And I’d say I know you decently well. If your gunman’s who I think he is, that’s a connection of mine you’re using. No matter how fleeting the moments we’ve had, Liana, it’s been damn near ten years.”

“You have to be kidding me,” she breathes, “A decade since I set foot on this fucking planet for the first time?”

“A little less, but close.” 

“That’s insane.”

“I’m thirty now, Liana,” Solomon chuckles, some fraction of the same wonder in his own voice. 

“The years disappear,” she murmurs.

“They really do.” 

They sit in quiet and drink their coffee, the room filling with a smell that smells to Solomon like home and he offers her a cigarette which she takes, mixing smoke in with the coffee and Solomon relaxes for a few brief seconds to forget everything that’s happening.

Sometimes he marks the point Liana Doste, known Astarum deserter to be walked through his door as the moment when things got serious, but he knows it was long before that. It was in Devon’s father’s basement tinkering with code and realizing in a few moments that they had more power than they’d ever dreamed of.

That was before Devon had left, come back a different person, a man. Sometimes Solomon still forgets he’s not the person Solomon wrote lines of programming with a decade and a half ago. (He remembers that person, so well.) 

The thing about Solomon, he’s discovered of himself, is he is little more than the backdrop to his life; he is a point of data among a binary sea, and what happens around him is more important than what’s contained within. He’s made peace with this.

Liana is one of a number of bright, saturated and passionate people Solomon has surrounded himself with over the years, a host of bright artifacts, paintings of vignettes in the form of people, beautiful and evanescent. 

Sometimes he forgets he’s not a momentary viewpoint of all the people around him, it’s easier to define himself by them, alongside them. The year he met Selah was the beginning of an era. The year Devon left was an ending. People become time more than time does to him.

“What I was trying to say,” he sums, “Is that you’ve been very important to me in the past. And no matter what happens in the coming weeks, I am indebted to you for a number of things.” 

“I would say it’s the other way around, especially after today,” Liana argues.

“Semantics,” Solomon brushes off, and leans in, “I have a feeling life is going to get a lot harder for both of us soon, I want to see you succeed. You and your crew have a good thing going. More than me or Pink Branch could ever have. You’re making a difference.”

Liana gives him a disbelieving look, dark eyebrows lifted and mouth turned downward into a frown, but she says nothing, finishing her coffee and slowly standing, making her way like some sort of elegantly graceful wisp of smoke from the alcove to the kitchen to put the mug into the sink. 

He wonders, privately, what happened in all the years. What changed both of them, what drew them further and further into causes deemed illegal for moral standpoints poorly defined and difficult to keep.

He wonders why neither of them regret this, as she says her goodbyes and assures him she’ll be in touch. As he sits on a planet he is quickly sending all of his friends away from. And he realizes perhaps his time is up here. 

He speaks to his computer.

“I’m going to set you to secure mode so I can re-read that conversation,” he mumbles as he sits down before it.

“Anything you say, boss.” 

* * *

When Precarious gets word from Liana, there is a sudden life brought to the deathly quiet that has become a second definition of the walls within the starship. It gets to them late on the evening of the second day of travel, when they are close to navigating into the unmapped region of the Saints they must cross to get to Saint Averynn. Virgo is in the control room keeping an eye on their relativity to the blank space in their navigation, and giving Scope enough of a break to go smoke a cigarette when it comes through. He sees it on the pilot’s main display but it’s only a message which reads ‘Message from --------: Read in Pilot’s Quarters.’ 

It’s a few minutes later that Scope’s voice echoes over the ship’s antiquated intercom system. 

“Meet in the crew lounge, please, we have comm from Liana,” he says, tired, but something in his voice is more relaxed than it has been the past few days. It’s like he’s strung tight with wires through his shoulders most of the time. Ready to uncoil and snap back.

Virgo nervously leaves the control panel as it is, autopilot whirring away. He slips down the stairs into the lounge, and finds Scope already standing there, something between relief and exhaustion on his face. Something tells Virgo this isn’t over, that the news just brings more to do. 

When he looks up to see Virgo, the relief washes stronger over the exhaustion for a moment. It recedes in moments, a quickly vanishing tide. Virgo settles wordlessly on one of the deep armchairs’ arms, fingers pulling at a thread at the hem of the “fledge” jacket he’s worn almost every day. Precarious runs a few degrees colder than Virgo is used to.

Cliptic comes into the room like mist over a hill, quiet and quick, her long blond hair pulled today not into a ponytail but into an intricate braided bun at the back of her head, not much unlike Liana’s usual hairstyle. She looks almost as tired as Scope does, but has no reprieve to the distance behind her eyes. Dane seems the only one to have gotten any sleep.

He appears at the door with solid shoulders and a relaxed look, something steady to focus on. As Cliptic takes the seat Virgo’s sat on the arm of, he sits across from her and Scope remains standing, nervously pacing a small patch of carpet and drumming his fingers on the back of the furniture. 

“The Astarum has a special forces group they’ve managed to keep very very quiet,” he says after clearing his throat, glancing but not meeting the eyes of anyone in the room, “They think we’re high enough profile to send a few after one of our own. They hitched a ride with the Peacekeepers that chased us off Pasmore.” 

“And now they have Devon,” Cliptic surmises. 

“What are these fuckers calling this arm of the corrupt maple?” Dane asks, leaning forward in his chair. 

“Aasvogel,” Scope mutters, “They have Devon. We’re still going to pick up Liana’s friend, then back to the home dock to await orders. But we know where he is. And we know where she is. And I’m kind of fucking pissed we just have to sit around once we pick this guy up so I’m proposing a veto.”

“We’re not going to veto Liana when we don’t have any information, Scope,” Dane says, level, but Cliptic looks conflicted, her eyes fixed on her fingers in her lap. 

“It might not be a bad idea to take alternate action,” she murmurs, quiet, but the rest of them fall silent to listen.

Virgo watches quietly, Dane leaning back but shaking his head.

“We don’t know anything, it’s smarter to wait.”

“In this circumstance waiting may cost lives,” argues Cliptic. She and Dane look at each other for a long moment, something serious and private passing between the two of them. A respect Virgo didn’t realize could cross generations in such a way.

“We’re picking up Liana’s friend, no matter what,” Dane finally concedes, “And I want everyone to take more time to think on what we do after we hit the Saints. If we want to discuss now that’s fine--” 

“That might not be smart,” Virgo cuts in quietly, “Scope needs to be at the controls soon.” His eyes flit up to the clock embedded in one wall of the lounge. “Really soon.” 

Dane nods. 

“Alright, we’ll discuss later.” he says, voice staying steady. 

 

The navdome is silent as Scope settles down beneath Virgo in his chair, but as they slowly make their way off the navcard and into the space where the dome’s projections only compile the data that Precarious itself is able to retrieve from its environment. In the scheme of things the light-year or so ahead they can now see is minimal in comparison to the previous eons of space viewable before, a minute into the future. It’s like sailing blind, in fog or in a storm, obscured, and caught suddenly in a liminal space so far from dry land it seems the nothing might stretch on forever.

There is, however, a rummaging behind him, and then Scope calls up in a quiet, half-conspiratorial voice.

“I have something for you to do if you’re bored, Virgo.” 

Virgo jumps, his fingers slipping on the Navcard in his fingers which he’s just removed from the astronavigator. He drops it back into the cardboard box Devon brought up on the way to Pasmore for him to store them in so he can use his bag.

He sets the book closed against it, feeling the nervous energy well up from his stomach to his throat. He tries not to think about how whatever it is Scope has for him to do is probably way above his pay grade (okay, he’s not really getting paid beyond room and board so maybe not pay grade, but far above his experience.) 

He slings himself down the ladder and pads over to the control seat where Scope has his eyes fixed firmly in front of him, flitting between the main display and the stars slowly streaking past the front display windows above the controls. Scope gestures without looking to the open drawer under the panel of the controls to one side of the ‘U’, opposite the circular faster-than-light core control array.  Inside the drawer are a mess of different keys, each with a tiny plastic chit, labeled in tiny meticulous handwriting in the common tongue and underneath it in a language that Virgo doesn’t recognize, written vertically in looping characters.

“Find the one that says astronavigator 12 would you?” Scope asks, gesturing vaguely at the drawer with a waving hand.

“Yeah, uh.” Virgo begins sifting through keys with almost-shaking fingers, there must be two dozen at least in the drawer. 

“Are these all to the ship?” 

“We don’t think so, we don’t know what half of them are honestly,” Scope says, snorting, “We just figure it’s better safe than sorry, holding on to ‘em.”

“Fair,” Virgo says, he finds a ring of keys all labeled ‘astronavigator’, but it’s numbers 1-6. He sets them aside anyway, and looks for a similar ring, but finds none other in the clutter. Instead he finds the other keys loosely scattered in the drawer, the 11th missing entirely. 

He sets all of them above the controls, but brings the 12th to Scope, holding the tiny intricate key in his palm. The bow and shoulder make the form of a hillside looking over intricate stars, and the teeth are as delicately sculpted and decorative as they are functional. Each of the astronavigator keys is much the same, but depicts a different set of stars through the key’s minute designs.

Scope shakes his head. 

“Take those up to the dome, the 12th should get you into the mapping panel. If you want you can see if we can get started on gathering data and pick up a blank card or two later,” Scope says, then a minute later, “Just somethin to do, no pressure.” in a softer voice. 

“I think I can do that,” says Virgo, voice smooth for how much he feels it should be trembling. 

He gathers the keys into the pocket of his jacket and ascends the ladder again, settling cross-legged in front of the astronavigator to try to figure out the 12th key’s place. It’s harder to find than he thought. So many small panels open up along the base of the dome, and so many hidden compartments and keyholes can be deceiving that it feels like Virgo has checked far more than 12 keyholes by the time he finds the one that the twelfth key slots into and turns inside. It opens a larger panel nearly at floor-level, that Virgo has to crane to see and operate. On the display it blinks across ‘blank card: insert? y/n’. Virgo selects ‘no’ and leans in to see the display better. It takes a little creative thinking, but getting the ship to begin recording its surroundings as data in the astronavigator isn’t hard. And when Virgo closes the panel and straightens up, he finds the miniature dome at the top of the astronavigator in the center of the navdome full of light, a visual representation in beautiful floating light, half-obscured by opaque dust left over in the dome for a lifetime. He sets the dome to stop recording at the point they land just as he can faintly hear Scope swearing from beneath him and he slips down the ladder again.

“What’s wrong?” the words are barely out of Virgo’s mouth as he sees the secondary display which has lifted from Scope’s primary one, showing the same map formation, data points becoming something between music and painting in beautiful multicolor light. Scope just points, something between shock and the distinct look of ‘almost impressed’ which Scope is good at. 

“To Averynn then?” Virgo asks, the waiver in his voice nearly unnoticeable. Scope looks at him for a moment, away from the display, and in the glow he looks sure of himself in a way he hasn’t in days. 

“To Averynn.” 

* * *

At the heart of the Saints lay four holy planets; Saint Averynn, Saint Dalen, Saint Orye, and Saint Vellacreux. The smallest of the four is Saint Dalen, an early, clumsy terraform from the Initial Expansion. Its capital, Dalen, is much smaller than a number of other cities on its surface, and while at the heart of a small religious empire, it’s a quiet planet with wide swaths of low-slung land broken by broad shallow rivers and marshland. For almost a thousand years, people have lived here in and around these rivers and made the quiet Saint Dalen something of a sanctuary, a place that while its capital is visited for religious pilgrimage, the rest remains a local’s secret which is constructed in fabric of faith and culture.

For most of the small planet’s life as a home for humans, there have been half-amphibious villages which build their lives on stilts lifted from shallow marshy water around the vast rivers centralizing around massive watery shrines, and their itinerant splinter culture of smaller floating villages of barge-houses tied among one another, rope and plank ladders often forming small ‘streets’ between houses which act both as residence and business in constantly moving fishing boat towns. 

The people of Saint Dalen have developed something unique to the planet, a resilience and quiet capacity to handle almost anything thrown at them with little reaction. And they, like most Orion’s Emissaries, on whole, worship Orion’s Saints; a pantheon of four patron saints of death borrowed from the pantheon which sprung from the Republic of Orion and expanded upon massively. 

Dalen, as legend told, found the bottom of the first ocean, and there resting was a great spirit of vast emptiness. He sat at the bottom of the ocean and spoke to the Nothing of the deep, and the great shark as it took its form, with a pair of thin tentacles from its face like a bastard of catfish and octopus, its form was slim and flickering with the light of the stars from under its midnight-dark blue-grey skin. Its eyes and its teeth flickered in the light cast from its own body, and Dalen, as he conversed with it, was struck by fear and the feeling of standing at the edge of a precipice far deeper than he could have ever understood.

He may have reached the bottom of the vast and empty ocean, but he did not reach through the vast and empty realm that lay beyond it, there was always more. It is always possible to go deeper. And in death, there is only further broadening of vast boundaries to knowledge and life, he discovered. 

The sect of Dalen which largely controls the planet values almost above all the vastness that sits just beyond the human realm’s periphery, and while this is something that the foreigner, Ngata Ira (who more often goes by ‘elderThings’) can understand and often identify with, it’s the floating lifestyle of his new companion (and accomplice) that is really taking getting used to.

Sanura Harrak is his unlikely accomplice, a twenty-something year old woman who has lived on Saint Dalen her whole life, and who is much more suited to a life in a small floating bungalow than the golden-skinned and highborn-raised foreigner.

He’s here to seek asylum. She provides it on the basis of needing company, and an assistant at times. She cut her family’s century-old floating home free from the village it had floated with for most of its life when she was only fifteen and inherited it. She became a priestess of sorts, nomadic, wandering the vast rivers and small calm seas of Saint Dalen as a witch paying patronage to Saint Dalen in her own way. 

And oftentimes, it’s a lonely life. Four weeks into a float across Dalen’s largest sea, a narrow swath of shallow ocean between two massive continents, Ira is getting increasingly restless. He misses being able to go for evening walks further than the narrow walkway around the house. 

Most times, the duo sleeps during the day and works at night, partially because Dalen’s noontime can be uncomfortably warm without shade, and partially because Sanura’s work often requires moonlight. 

Tonight there is none, and sitting in the small low-slung square of benches both feels the tension. They sit amongst the vastness and feel it, both in their own ways, Sanura’s hands are folded into almost-flowers, resting on the place where her shins cross before her. Her dark skin, so dark it could hold galaxies, shines against the reflected light from the barge-house against the dark ocean around them. Lips decorated with pale purple and blue and pink, patterned like a faded nebula fall slack, unmoving, dark lashes hanging low over cheeks painted with tiny shells and dustings of pink and blue. She has pale green eyes behind her eyelids, but Ira is the only one he’s ever met who feels like meditation is best done with the eyes open, with no filter between the world and oneself. 

He sits slack, relaxed, dark-featured face framed by asymetrical hair dyed chromic grey and cropped short near his earswith an asymetrical strip of multicolored overhang to one side. One eyebrow has a shaved-in split; the one not covered. His lips are decorated, unlike hers, in dark ink, permanent and spilling down his chin in a series of designs which are mirrored in the ink across his forehead which depicts the solar system he grew up in, starting with his home planet between his eyebrows. 

She would chastise him for his strange appearance were she watching and were it maybe two months earlier into their living with one another. Now they have found a kind of peace, as long as he meditates she doesn’t mind how he does so. Tonight he’d rather not be doing so, but he humors her.

He has more important things to be doing with his night, but this night like every night on this boat has started with the meditation, and it’s different tonight; they’ve reached the point in the Sea of Souls that they’ve been floating toward for weeks. And now they’re waiting, silent, in the early-evening meditation.

They’re waiting for the sharks. 


	8. Message to Captain

Saint Averynn’s atmosphere seems thin compared to the ones Virgo has seen before, with high mountains which scrape it like wide seams, the wide valleys between them seem varied in climate, with the high mountains seemingly making defined borders between biomes on a scattered number of average-sized continents. As Precarious descends it heads for a deep jungle the likes of which Virgo has never seen, some of the trees are large enough to see from just within the atmosphere, almost competing in size with some of the foothills in the shadows of the nearby mountains, they sprawl across the canopy like miniature continents in their own right, some the size of islands from back home. 

They descend into a hole in the emerald leafy sea and find that the canopy stretches far enough from the floor to situate a small port on one of the massive trunks and still have a long stretch between the port entrance and what seems to be the forest floor. As they approach it reveals not to be the floor, though, but a series of platforms suspended some twenty to fifty feet above the ground from the trees, and some of the trees themselves are false, although it’s hard to tell from the canopy.

Precarious settles on a wide wood slab built out from a wide trunk, nose tilting toward a sky going indigo dark, and Saint Averynn’s triple star system slowly fading into the thick foliage. Scope gathers the four remaining crew members in the lounge, the pacing starting up again as they wait for Dane and coming to an abrupt halt when he enters the room.

“I want to leave half of us on board in case anything happens. I don’t know what’s going to happen, so who wants to stay? It’ll be safer here.”

“Virgo is the most expendable,” Cliptic says, then looking up to meet Virgo’s eyes she looks a little guilty, “From a tactical point of view. Not from an emotional or personal standpoint. I would be forced to let Dane go in that case.” 

“You are an honest stone cold bitch,” Dane mutters.

“Watch it, she’s a good honest bitch,” Scope returns, something of a smile flickering over his face for half a second.

Cliptic shakes her head. 

“I should stay and watch the ship, I believe I am the only other person now who can pilot it should the need arise. And Dane should stay as he is valuable from a tactical standpoint and one of Liana’s trusted contacts.” 

Scope nods.

“You’re right, alright, fledge,” he says, and Virgo looks up nervously, feeling anxiety pump through his veins with each heartbeat. For some reason this feels risky. 

“I hope you can shoot,” Scope adds, quieter, as he gestures for Virgo to follow him, and Virgo bites his lip because he’s shot a gun a few times but only a few and this is just further proof Scope’s got at least slightly the wrong idea of who he is. Which, he guesses, was the point of leaving the planet that knew his face and never giving a last name.

There’s a fold-out cabinet in one of the removeable side panels of the cargo bay which holds a compound rack of a number of heavy firearms which Virgo finds only vaguely familiar. Something about Scope’s demeanor changes the second the door clicks open and the artificial bay light glints off the metal. He looks Virgo up and down and gestures at a pair of small pistols hanging at the lower side of the back of one of the doors, and he goes for a rifle and a strange smaller gun which has a wider chamber and a strange hood across the side of the barrel displaying a complex set of mechanics Virgo doesn’t fully understand. It takes a few moments for both of them to get their guns holstered, and Scope notices Virgo’s clumsiness with concealing them so he helps, mostly in silence. 

Scope’s jaw falls harder now, his eyes reveal less exhaustion and flicker with less light., farther away and almost-darker. 

Virgo keeys his own down, tries not to look too hard at the ground while he fights the urge to ask why they’re going in with firepower, but by the time they return to the cargo bay, he can’t resist the urge to say something.

“We haven’t gone out with guns any other times,” Virgo points out, as Scope is disengaging the cargo door. 

“You’ve never been further from the galactic bar than Cavan,” Scope murmurs, voice almost-grave, almost-toneless. Virgo bites his tongue, gently, nodding. He hadn’t thought of that. He grew up hearing stories of how wild and lawless the outer rings of the milky way have always been, the barbarian peoples of those planets and anarchic moons and space stations taken over by roaming raiders. 

He remembers being told they take bad children from the street and ferry them away to the outer planets. Cavan, all told, is close in, and parents still told this story. He feels a little safer with the pistols tucked inside his jacket, actually, thinking about that.

They step out of Precarious and onto the high platform, wind whistling through the trees. The two of them set out from there down the hollowed tree that makes up the main starship port for this portion of Saint Averynn. It lets out on a relatively quiet platform a ways away from the main platform cluster making up this small city. Through the slats of sturdy wood and reeds making up the path leading from one platform to the next, Virgo can see thirty feet down a massive, dark lake, glittering in twilight. The trees and their roots make up a series of small islands throughout the mass lake which almost covers the extent of the visible floor of the jungle. 

The platforms most buildings are on are artificial, concrete and metal but some seem older, wooden and falling apart, some houses at the fringe of the city sag on their platforms and threaten to pitch themselves to the lake before, held up only by ropes or metal brackets holding them to the trees they lean away from. 

Scope leads them through in silence but keeps checking the small mapbox on his wrist. He hasn’t been here, Virgo decides, this place is new to him, and he’s at the height of his guard. 

Virgo stays a few steps behind, following Scope to another smaller level of platforms beneath the larger main city ones. It’s difficult to see beyond a block now, buildings connected by bridges here rather than sets of larger platforms, and most seem to be houses. This is in some ways, Virgo figures, a suburb. 

He watches Scope nervously check his mapbox again, the little projection hovering over it in surprising detail is cutting out a little now that they’re underneath the concrete of the streets above, and then they turn onto a narrow rope-and-reed bridge which takes them down to a small platform a little further out but still underneath the main platform, only ten or fifteen feet off the water, where bugs come in swarms, and the ripples of fish can be seen all across the murky water. There is a large wraparound porch attached to the narrow bridge, and the house sitting on the platform is near-round with sheet metal walls and a grass roof. The door is a wide arch, split into six sections, three in two rows, which is broken at eye level by a peep hole made of domed glass. It’s fractured and collecting dust, the house itself succumbing to rust. The porch is decorated along the border of the house with black feathers hanging from the slight overhang of the roof and a number of bones hung like beads among braided colored rope webs stretching across the railing protecting the porch from the short drop into the water below. At the base of the tree, Virgo can see as they approach, a pair of crocodiles rest in the shade, their tails trailing off into the water like sentences left unfinished.

Scope pushes the button beside the door to set off the interior buzzer, gesturing for Virgo to stand back a little, something about his face’s taut fall making Virgo certain it’s best to have his guard up before the door opens. . 

It does so by folding in on itself, revealing before them a figure some five foot two at most. He has messy chestnut colored hair which falls heavily over steel blue eyes which are ringed in flame-colored eyeliner and a few strange red and gold squares of makeup scattered across his cheeks, like a computer screen breaking while simultaneously on fire. It’s not the sight Virgo was expecting, dark robes slung across his shoulder and coalescing in a dark hood. Like the Emissaries that they met on Pasmore, he has hands painted black, with white powdering like spent ash over coal, and his skin is the color of roasted coffee beans. 

He seems unsurprised to see them, his face not changing in blank expression when he sees them. 

“Who sent you?” he says, and his voice is touched by an accent Virgo now recognizes as distinctly Emissarian, with a strange twist to certain vowels and short, swift consonants, but his tone carries little emotion. His pupils almost seem to twist as he looks at them, like lenses. His movements are calm, and measured. 

“Liana Doste,” says Scope, just as steady, his resolve as measured as the stranger’s.

“And you are?” 

“Walter Scope, her pilot.”

“And him?” The Emissary looks at Virgo with blank eyes. His fingers drum against his arm. 

“Virgo, navigator,” Virgo pipes up, quiet. The Emissary nods. 

“You’re both armed I presume? If you come in for coffee I can introduce myself,” he says, finally. 

“I’m armed, the navigator is untrained,” Scope says, “He’s here for the learning experience.” 

The Emissary seems to believe this, with a short snort he shakes his head and holds a hand out to Scope. 

“I’ll have to take your weapons,” he says, without aggression or disdain, just as blank. Scope warily nods, handing over both guns. The Emissary then beckons them inside, the house seems larger on the inside, a single circular room only broken by one closed off room, presumably a bathroom, and the bed loft built near the dome ceiling on top of the bathroom, and stretching out over the small kitchen next to the bathroom to form an enclosed if short bedroom of sorts. At the exact center of the room is a circular altar, a small fire set in a pit at its center. Bones and feathers are cast around the fire, along with a number of pipes which seem to constitute an instrument of some sort, and much of the dome roof is broken into thin windows not visible from the outside of the shack, letting in the almost-dead light of Averynn’s star-system. 

Around the altar are a circle of benches set into the floor, decorated with richly designed pillows in gold and black. The Emissary waves a hand toward them, as he crosses to the kitchen to settle a dark colored kettle into its electric cradle and collect a trio of handleless ceramic mugs designed in swirling colorful patterns. 

Scope settles first, eyes glancing quickly to the seat directly beside him, which Virgo takes as direction and sits. He nervously forces his hands not to fidget over one another. Scope gives him a short approving nod and keeps his eyes on the Emissary, who takes only a few moments to return with three steaming cups of dark coffee.

He sets each on an ornate saucer placed in front of one seat, and takes a seat in the vacant one, looking slowly from Virgo to Scope and back again. 

“My name is Mahyar Zadmehr,” he says, “My beginnings were on Mantar, I know your captain, but only nominally. I am however, an extant agent of an organization she has done favors for in the past. It is my understanding you need more manpower, in a real way. Not child’s play.” 

Virgo glances nervously at Scope, whose eyes are now focused largely on the window across from the couch. Virgo lets his gaze snap back to Mahyar, who looks at them levelly until Scope responds with a short, 

“That’s what Liana wants.” 

“I am ready to leave after coffee. Before we leave I would much like to learn about the man that Liana Doste leaves in charge of her ship, though, should your words come easy.”

“What do you need to know?” Scope asks, voice almost as flat as Mahyar’s. 

“Where are you from?” 

“Cereus,” Scope doesn’t touch his coffee, so neither does Virgo, but Mahyar takes a long sip, blank telescopic eyes fixed on Scope’s face, “The northwestern edge of the Ceresian Sea.”

“How did you meet Liana Doste?” 

“We served in the Astarum military together, she was my commanding officer.” 

“And Virgo, how did you come by this merry bunch of thieves?” Mahyar’s voice doesn’t lilt, his eyes slowly focus on Virgo, who bites his lip, takes a deep breath, tries not to stutter.

“I found an employment advertisement.” 

“Really.” 

“Yes, really.” 

Mahyar looks vaguely surprised. He raises his dark-painted hands to run over the dusting of stubble across his chin but doesn’t break the stare. Virgo wonders if he ever does or if this is just a first-time-meeting intimidation tactic. Sitting down and with a glare that hard Virgo’s almost forgotten how small and, all things told, scrawny, Mahyar seemed at first glance.

“And you, Walter, you’ve been with Liana Doste since her time leaving the Astarum?” 

“This is starting to sound like a peacekeeper interview,” Scope mutters, “Yes.” 

Mahyar nods. 

“I’m simply trying to understand your motivations.” 

“My motivation is whatever Liana says my motivation is,” returns Scope, voice still level, his eyes are watching something out the window though. Virgo nervously glances up but only sees a small group of travellers clustered around the signpost at the corner that leads off to the reed bridge leading to Mahyar’s metal round house. They don’t seem to be interested in the house itself. 

Mahyar sighs. 

“I am an ally, although I worry you will not treat me as one,” he hums. 

“I’m rough on new crewmates, if you can’t take it then you’re obviously not the gunman we’re looking for.” 

“If he can ‘take it’, I can ‘take it’,” Mahyar says, with a smirk and a gesture toward Virgo. Virgo swallows, and he’s opening his mouth to retort but Scope suddenly has a hand snagged in his jacket and is pulling him over and within a few seconds he has one pistol out of Virgo’s jacket and is standing, crossing to the door, hovering behind the frame before tossing it open and shrinking back again. 

Standing before the door is an Emissary, crouched, mid-tinker with a small metal box set just to the side of the door. The box is decorated with a small blinking light and seems to be boring small holes into the ground with long telescopic poles. 

Scope takes one look at the box and shoots it blank, the woman before him jumping to her feet, and drawing a long curved knife from within her robes, and debris flying past both of them. 

He steadies his gun on her and her knife as Mahyar rises to his feet, position tense, balanced and coiled to spring, then the back window goes through and three men and a pair of drones force their way through the metal wall with some sort of saw. 

“So much for subtlety,” the woman mutters, and for the fraction of a second Scope gauges the situation for she lashes out, jumping into action and taking a wide swing at him, but he jumps back, a move that takes his heels firmly to the back of the couch, and he pinwheels his free arm for a moment so as to not fall backward onto the table but he springs to the side and Virgo unfreezes as he does so, reaching for his gun as Mahyar does the same. Three pearly white Astarum guns point at them from under the mens’ robes, as Virgo tremblingly holds his up alongside his two companions’ and they are suddenly at an impasse. Mahyar’s expression does not falter as the hand not on his own gun slowly slips back into its sleeve and he forces Virgo down to the bench with the forearm of his gun hand before letting a trio of throwing knives go. Two hit, both drones fall from their place beside their masters, and time slows as the bullets start flying. Virgo feels the entire world spinning underneath him, hears the bullets flying, hitting metal, shattering, hears the voices of the disguised-as-Emissaries shouting in a language he doesn’t know, and then he’s being dragged upward by someone,  he doesn’t know who, and Mahyar’s at one side with an arm wrapped around the woman, two men on the floor, one gone, Scope beside him silent and then breathing into his ear, 

“We have to get out of here, can you move? You hit?” 

“I’m okay,” Virgo manages, wavering, his throat working against itself.

“Go,” Mahyar murmurs, and then Scope’s hand is tangled in his jacket again and they’re half-running back out over the swinging bridge while a shot rings out behind them and the crocodiles have startled from their basking, watching warily from a far tree trunk now, there are birds calling warning songs from the canopy and Virgo stops thinking until they’re in the Cargo hold and Mahyar and Dane are closing the door while Scope half-drags him away to the command room. 

Their ascent is quick and turbulent, their escape precarious but seemingly secured. 

 

Once they’re out of atmosphere and out of the few hours of unmapped area covering most of the Saints, Virgo sets a course for a small planet called Riziyun, located in a far-outer arm of the galaxy in a swath of stars and planets controlled by the Great Nebula Commonwealth, with an independent, loosely grouped political structure that makes use of the farthest and least well-kept terraforms left from the initial expansion. Most of the region, as Virgo knows, is made up of technologically deficient and isolated planets, while much of it is unmapped, Riziyun lays at its inner border, close to Astarum territory, where only small parts of the space are unmapped and on whole the planets are still cared for. 

This means that they can turn on autopilot and that Scope can call the crew together to meet and, in their own way, interrogate, Mahyar. 

They settle around the kitchen/dining table, Mahyar and the head and Scope facing him, hands crossed. Mahyar looks displeased; less blank than before. The three of them, Virgo, Scope, and Mahyar, gather before the others, and Mahyar is quick to speak as he watches them settle.

“You did not tell me you were armed in my house,” he says, carefully, spitefully. 

“It saved all our asses, too,” Scope returns. Virgo stays silent, examining the table at great length. 

“It disrespects my faith and myself,” says Mahyar.

“It saved our lives,” Scope repeats, “And you’re going to have to learn to take my orders if you’re going to be working with us.”

“Am I,” Mahyar intones, eyebrows raising minutely. Cliptic appears then, in the doorway to the medbay. 

“Hello, Mahyar,” she says, then to scope, “Are you two alright? Do either of you need my attention?” 

Scope shakes his head. “Virgo?”

“I’m okay,” Virgo murmurs, still staring at the table. Everything around him twists in his gut, overwhelmed and shaken. 

“You’ve introduced yourselves then?” Scope asks Cliptic, and she agrees, leaving only Dane’s introduction when he finally appears. They tensely gather for a quick lunch, learning vaguely of one another but only stiffly, distantly, as it seems Mahyar is capable. Virgo falls into a post-stress daze.

 

Scope notices, near the end of the meal, how Virgo’s hazel eyes have glazed over dusky and distressed. He quietly tugs on Virgo’s sleeve and leads him down the hall to his bedroom as the meal concludes, settling Virgo on his bed and taking the seat beside it. Virgo looks around, vaguely surprised he’s not in his own bedroom, and casting distant eyes out to the stars drifting past the window, lightyears away. 

“You aren’t doing so hot,” observes Scope. Virgo quietly shakes his head.

“I’m okay.” 

“You don’t have to say that.” 

Virgo just meets his eyes, something flickering behind them. Scope fights the frown that crosses his face, the memory of young soldiers who’d seen firefights for the first time. This is different, less hollow and more drifting, groundless. Not the same kind of fear, but the same kind of loneliness. Isolation within a drifting, precarious mortality suddenly realized. 

Something about the fear becomes precise, focused, as Scope sits beside him on the bed, evolving, and Scope thinks briefly of the stories of Cavan, the Coral Caravan, and the other caravan planets neighboring it; of men put to death for less than sitting beside one another on a bed in the vast emptiness of space. He feels guilty, but doesn’t know how better to express a safety than to quietly accept this reality as normal, and hope Virgo can do the same. 

On Cereus, it was not an issue, there were more important things, among the ranks of the Astarum, however, Scope remembers listening to commanding officers scream at only certain soldiers for ‘distractions’ and ‘putting things above their crew’. He managed to skate by with Liana, an officer willing to turn a blind eye to crew habits so long as they performed well. Some part of him that he regrets pities Virgo for perhaps not managing to escape the same judgement Scope was lucky enough to evade. Trembling beside him, Virgo seems to be uncertain, waiting for Scope to move again. 

Scope reaches for the controls sitting on the bedside table for the larger display facing the bed, and hooks into the technically-barely-legal relay the ship has built in. 

“The service isn’t great but,” he murmurs, clicking over with the portable controller to the Cavani news feed. Virgo’s eyes skim quickly, and Scope watches him freeze, follows his gaze to the screen.

And there, a few days old, a headline ‘search continues: cavani head councillor’s son presumed kidnapped following her death’, beside it is a picture of Virgo’s face, framed in titian red curls, a photo a year or two old, shoulders-up and formal. 

Virgo bites his lip as Scope looks between the picture and Virgo.

“Uh,” Virgo breathes. 

“You didn’t tell me you were royalty,” Scope says, he keeps his voice steady, his eyebrows raised. 

“I’m not, uh, Cavan has a weird system for the head councillor, it’s only passed down if the approval rating is very very high, no one expected until it was voted later that I would become the next head councillor.” Virgo’s voice is suddenly a nervous tumble.

“So you’re a politician,” Scope says, feeling something in his gut sinking.

“No, vak kaesten, I never wanted that, I never wanted to be involved with all of it, that’s why I left,” his voice is trembling now, accent thickening with emotion. Scope takes a deep breath. He nods.

“I wish you would have told us,” he says, forcing his voice quieter, “You’re a larger risk than we thought.”

“I’m sorry.”

Scope sighs again, following it with a deep breath. He scrolls past Virgo’s picture. Into another screen, something lighter, a scientific video feed, dolphins in an ocean on a planet in the Icarus Institute’s territory, breaching, playing, followed by a remote camera which can almost hardly keep up with them. He leaves that on the screen, and hands the controls to Virgo.

“We’ll talk about it later. For now, we won’t worry about it, you need to relax.”

He stands, pushing Virgo’s shoulder gently to the bed. Something in his stomach lurches at the expression of shock that momentarily flickers over Virgo’s face, he tries not to think about it. He sets his pack of cigarettes and the ashtray within reach of the bed and crosses to the doorway.

“The comm connects to the control room,” he says while standing there, “Tell me if you need anything.”

“Okay,” Virgo mumbles from the bed, eyes already fixing on the screen.

* * *

It’s a dark and jagged dorsal that breaks the water first, scarred from seeming eons of life under the sea, it’s massive, reflecting stars and starlight as water glistens off it slowly rising in the water, the back-forth sway says shark and Ira’s instincts are to innately freeze in fear. He adjusts his glasses and presses a button on the side to view the thermal image, but even where the visible fin meets the water, the heat signature trails off.

As he clicks his vision back to normal, Sanura’s eyes open like tiny stars being born, and she raises them to watch the jagged fin approach, suddenly joined by half a dozen, then a dozen, then two dozen other fins. They swarm like bees, like the boat is made of carrion

Sanura lights a small candle which she carries with her to the bow of the boat, and lowers down to sit almost at the level where the lapping waves might extinguish it. As she does so, a number of the sharks come to investigate, coming close but not too-close to the flame.

As the serpentine sharks see the flame, luminescent patches along their sides begin to glow, pulsing patterns, almost in-time with the flames and the waves around them. 

Soon the congregation of sharks has erupted into bright blue light, each flickering as it moves its body,  .each seemingly entranced by the candle. They hang suspended like that for a few long moments, and then one shark rushes the candle, the wave it creates with its tail as it takes a sharp turn to not hit the barge extinguishes the candle. Within a few moments the sharks have gone dark, too, their glow and their iridescent dorsals disappearing into the dark.

Ira casts a startled glance at Sanura, who is looking, just as shocked, down at the candle.

“I’m guessing that’s a bad sign.” 

“It’s the worst sign the Saints have had in a very long time,” Sanura breathes.

“Guess I should let you have some space then.”  He doesn’t wait for her response before disappearing back into the house-barge. 

His room sits below the water, large glass windows exposing him to the deep, and when he sits inside the display screen of the computer module he has situated beside his bed reflects off the glass window and the view outside is cryptic and fractured with light.

He sits here in this liminal space, trying not to curse his inability to be spiritual as he logs in to speak to Solomon again.

Of all the Pink Branch operatives, Solomon has been of a specific interest to Ira. 

P:NK Branch was founded following the privatization of Icarus Institute knowledge despite a galactic knowledge provider claim, originally a real operative group has grown into a dispersed, only nominally organized registration of Starship Guild members interested in new ideals and the pursuit of true galactic knowledge. Ira was, four years ago at thirteen years old, one of Pink Branch’s head operatives. He has always been good with programming. It’sjust an extension of that.

Solomon has the same skillset, but something different; he has initiative, and like a great many from the small moon, Mantar, he has stealth unmatched by other corners of the galaxy. He has something unique, and an almost artistic take on computers that baffles Ira’s technical background. He might be the revolutionary breath of fresh air that Pink Branch needs to end this war once and for all.

Maybe.

It’s worth trying anyway. 

* * *

Scope returns to his room sometime later for a cigarette to find the display timed out, dark, and in the small violet glow of the round-window lighting, Virgo stretched across his bed, relaxed, half asleep with one of Scope’s Cerean military history books laid out before him, as Scope enters he can hear the page lazily turning and he feels his stomach catch in his throat as he looks at the young man spread out in his bed and tries not to think further on the topic.

Virgo looks up blearily and makes this just a little harder. Scope’s eyes catch on freckles illuminated by soft purple light.

“Hey, sorry,” he murmurs, and Scope tries to think of something witty to say but can’t. 

“Hey. Just taking a break. You want to come back with me? We’ll hit atmosphere soon,” he says instead, softly, sitting beside Virgo. Virgo straightens up, there’s less fear in his eyes now, but still that anxiety. An impulsive idea crosses Scope’s mind as he reaches into a drawer accessible above the bed. The small green flowers within are dry, crumpled, and they fit into the intricate metal and glass construction they’re stored next to.

“I’ll come,” Virgo says, eyes suddenly fixed on Scope’s hands as he slots the flowers into the indented crater at one end of the metal-and-glass creature, alien or deep ocean it’s hard to tell. He hands it over to Virgo who tentatively takes it, and removes a lighter from a different drawer, to light the pipe for him. Virgo, still dazed, takes a moment to respond, but sucks and comes back with a mouth full of smoke that Scope watches him cough clumsily through before taking his own smoke from the pipe. They continue like that, Scope lighting the pipe for Virgo for a few minutes before Virgo speaks.

“What is this?” he asks, this time exhaling through his words. He learns quickly.

“A plant that grows on a whole bunch of planets. Nothing harmful.” 

“It’s a drug, though.” Virgo’s voice isn’t judging, just quietly imploring.

“Yeah, it’s a drug, just not the kind that will destroy you from the inside out,” says Scope.

“Feels warm,” Virgo murmurs, after a few more seconds of silence. Scope laughs softly. 

He lights a cigarette, and they talk quietly about how Virgo used to live in something like a castle, how strange it is that two men from such different beginnings could be sitting here, and somewhere near the end it brushes from his lips without thinking, and strikes them both silent. 

“Can I kiss you?” it’s something between a question and a statement of intent from Scope’s lips, but they both freeze, startled, and then Virgo gives a quick and nervous nod and it’s not like Scope can take it back now that he’s nervous what he’ll do, so he leans in. 

Virgo jumps, but reciprocates for a few short seconds before both break nervously, Virgo looking down to examine his hands. 

“Work?” he mutters, even though under violet light and dark skin Scope can see his cheeks going bright red. Scope nods, swiftly, some sense of giddiness, excitement, and maybe something else growing in his gut, which he quells quietly as he stands and leads the way back to the control room. 

Touchdown on Riziyu doesn’t go how other landings have gone, with a quick message to the port and a zip in; they have to wait in orbit hours for clearance and Scope takes this opportunity for another crew-wide meeting to discuss the state of order.

It’s decided, routinely, that they will be splitting their forces between this ship and Scope’s own ship docked on Riziyu. They’ll leave Cliptic and Mahyar to carry out Liana’s orders with Scope’s larger better defensed ship, while Dane, Virgo, and Scope leave to find Devon.

They argue back and forth about which groups will be going where, but in the end Scope has the final say and organizes them to his preference, and the rest stay quiet as they are finally allowed entrance to the small rocky desert that Riziyu is covered in. 

Strange fruit trees stretch twisted along the streets visible from the port despite the blast of heavy heated air, and the waves above the small and scattered city stretching out before them, like it might be a mirage. 

They  stay within the port, simply crossing to the C-Class portion, which is much larger, and inside, seemingly much more modern than simple slab platforms used for D-Class vessels, slick and with partitioned landing spaces for vehicles of different spaces, diagnostic digital check-ins, in-station fuelers, and docking wires.  At the far corner, a small ship hangs next to a small personal exit. The name, seemingly used only for permanent ships docked here, which is printed in block letters above the ship’s exit, reads ‘the Usual Suspect’.

It is slender, smoother than precarious and longer, with less of a beak at its front and more of a wide-swathed upside down bell. It’s larger, also seems about the same age despite a more sleek build; this is a fighter and a scout vehicle, not a passenger transporter.

Virgo breathes in sharply looking at it, reflecting bright light from the interior of the hangar. 

“Cliptic, do you remember how to fly Suspect?” Scope’s voice is joking but has an edge of nervousness and protectiveness.

“I should hope so,” she returns, reaching for his keys and cards. He hands both to her.

“Be careful with it,” he murmurs, sighing a deep sigh and looking half-longingly at his vehicle, “And send a message to Liana once you’re aboard to tell her what’s happening.”

“We will. Will you be alright?”

“We’ll be fine,” Dane pipes in.

“Alright, please be careful,” Cliptic insists, and they’re caught in a quick flurry of goodbyes, returning to Precarious, refueling, and then they’re off again, into the deep black sky. Something feels deeply wrong about this decision, but Virgo knows the news will reach Liana soon, and Scope’s last chance to change his mind is quickly coming up on the horizon as they leave Riziyun’s behind. And Virgo has a feeling that once Scope sets something behind him, he tries to keep it that way. The decision’s been made. And this is the first time Precarious will fly under anyone but Liana’s direct order for half a century or more. Something tells Virgo that as wrong as it feels, that’s just because they’re on the brink of something big. And scarier than he’s ever been able to imagine before. 

The things that lay just beyond human perception grow closer and whisper in the seconds when cosmic background radiation fills the control room with the blinding brightness of a thousand stars being born and the ship moves in tandem with the speed of light. The things that exist deeper in the universe sing through those moments like whalesong, and they sing a song of standing on the precipice of a vast nothing. 


	9. The Precarious Escape (Proof That I Loved You)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gore Content Warning.

Virgo settles in the pilot’s seat while Scope leans over the controls at the center and Virgo puts himself in front of the circular lightspeed array. Once they’re out of atmosphere and at travelling speed, Scope tugs gently on Virgo’s screen, and catches his wrist while he stands to return the seat. Something in his eyes says he wants to say something, but instead he just presses a kiss to the very corner of Virgo’s mouth. 

“I’m going to show you something, fledge,” he says, “I think you’re going to like this.” 

As he takes control with a quiet ease, and checks his display before taking a wide arc around a system of six or seven stars they’ve been jetting past, and toward a wide swath of light formed into two shields touching faces, one much smaller, darker, the larger bright white at the meeting and then casting itself off into clouds of red and smoke-like grey light. It grows from the distance but doesn’t seem to get brighter; Virgo expects the place where the dual shields of the nebula meet to become so bright it’s blinding as they approach, but it doesn’t; remains the same even white even as they approach and it’s made evident how massive the cloud is, Virgo leans forward to better see it, a mass body stretching up and away for what seems like forever, bigger than any world Virgo’s ever seen, bigger than any star.

Inside the cloud, hundreds of stars glitter, some still just being born, a few ringed in dense gas rings that seem to whirl almost as fast as light itself, circling the stars like frenzied planets dragged into orbit. The cloud isn’t singular, either; it moves like seagrass underwater, as if blown by unseen wind and the stars that spit matter out into the open sky cause eddies and disturbances in the dust-gas tide. 

Scope leans back to look at Virgo’s face as his eyes make their way over the mass of blue and green and red and violet, the nebula laid out before and above them like the most massive, entrancing aurora to ever be seen.

Somewhere at the center, an asteroid collides with a star and the flare around it sets into motion a chain reaction of momentary tiny sparkles across the nebula. Virgo glances back to look at Scope whose eyes are lighting up too. 

Scope smiles at him, a real smile, relaxed for just a moment in this detour. He takes Precarious in a wide curve underneath the nebula, and they travel along it with the clear dome above their heads fixed facing toward the vast beauty of interstellar birth and death for some half hour before they reach the other side, and Scope takes them back into open space. Virgo leans in to steal a breathless, amazed kiss before realizing what he’s done and springing back, from the place leaned over Scope’s chair and quickly waving the action away with his hands.

“Send me the coordinates we’re headed to, I’ll be up in the dome,” he waivers, nervous, guilty. 

* * *

The Usual Suspect is a newer ship than Precarious; designed by a company called AltitudeInstitute, which over the past fifty years has shifted their focus away from the starships they were known galaxy-wide for (and the designs they often created for official Astarum Armada ships) and toward the ideals they were founded on; artificial intelligence and a new splinter group Hyacinth Industries. The Usual Suspect is stolen, its identification scratched and encrypted, making it difficult to land inside CCA or Astarum territory. 

Cliptic waits for word from her captain while remaining in orbit. Mahyar makes her nervous, and being alone with him without much tie to the world beyond a gravitational pull they could break at a seconds notice makes her moreso. She’s glad Suspect doesn’t require the same engine monitoring that Precarious does. It means that at her place in the small, dual-sectioned control room, she can keep an eye on him, lounging in one of the seats behind the two pilots’ seats that Suspect has but doesn’t necessarily need; the secondary one, which Cliptic has left alone, is solely in control of an array of shooters which Suspect hides behind its smooth off-white exterior. 

She carefully lets her hair down and reties it at the crown of her head, casting another glance at Mahyar.

“I know you’re watching me, Miss Cliptic,” he says, without looking up from the puzzle ball his hands and eyes are fixated on.

“I do not have much else to do while we wait for Liana’s order, and neither do you. That makes me very nervous,” Cliptic explains.

“What are you worried I might do? I’m synthetic, not homicidal,” Mahyar says, his flat tone portraying no emotion, now that she knows his tone of voice makes her shiver inside.

“You’re synthetic too,” he continues, looking over his puzzle at Liana’s arm, “Not as much, but you chose to be. I didn’t have that privilege.” 

Cliptic feels her jaw clench but says nothing, turning back to the controls. Riziyun is prettier from the air than from the ground. And a more comfortable temperature. She’s preferred this view to the one from the ground since first setting foot on Riziyun when Precarious’ mission was still young, and their connections to Pink Branch still uncertain. 

Cliptic is momentarily wistful for the lake she grew up next to on Kitani, for the cool off-water air and the smell of growing. It’s been a long time since she smelled something growing.

She wonders what life might be like if she’d bombed her standard tests, if she’d never tested high enough for the Astarum to take interest, to want to train her, if she’d never left her atmosphere. Like most times she finds herself wishing for this, she quickly tells herself she’d never trade her life and friends-now-family for the world. 

“Have I troubled you? It’s hard to face one’s own artificial reality,” Mahyar says, “If you’d ever be interested in the meditation arts…”

“I have a faith thank you,” Cliptic cuts him off, “I am and will always be cosmocentrin.” 

Mahyar’s face twitches with distaste for a moment, and it’s his turn to stay silent, but he’s bad at it. 

“I hope death treats you well then, in whatever small sad reality you believe death is.” 

Cliptic snorts a snort she learned from Scope. 

“And I hope you do not squander your life waiting for a death that will bring nothing after it,” she returns, politely. 

“I have a feeling I won’t be well liked among this crew,” Mahyar says, with a soft breath that could be a chuckle. 

“I believe that feeling may be shared.” 

* * *

Echo has no last name, born under a dark sky she never had a star to name her after, and her parents never stayed long enough to affix their surname to hers, so when she was found on the doorstep of a Cavani aristocratic family, they named her Echo, a faint reimagining of an already-dead star, and left her family to be decided.

When she came of age at sixteen she was left again, a feeble memory of a girl left to wander the streets of Viltir with nothing to her name but a dress which bore nebulas of bright fabric. 

She met Virgo as a child, and fell in love with him shortly thereafter. As childhood romances go, it faded, but something of it remained, a trust and connection she never shook despite his growing interest in a world further than she ever dreamed of going. 

When he left she knew, in the end, nothing had made him leave but his own volition, and no matter how hard she fought peacekeepers and the officials who questioned her, thinking she’d been part of the scheme. 

It’s been a week since she broke out of jail in the only city she ever knew as home, imprisoned for being implicit in the kidnap of her childhood best friend, and fled across the open ocean on a trading ship to that city’s twin, only to find herself in such a different city she feels completely ill at ease.

She’s bending to Deltiri custom now, covering her hair in a scarf patterned in a million colors and dressing in brighter fabric, more fashionable to fit in amongst the trend-setting crowds of Deltiri finery. She sings at the open air market for a few handfuls of coral sheks, and goes home to a small shell of an abandoned building draped with cloth and a view out over the ocean so far she can just barely see the volcano she once called the north star point of ‘home’. 

Echo is as she as been so many times before a ghost of what she’s been and what she could be. She listens, though.

And lately she’s been hearing something stirring amongst the aristocrats gone for walks among the busy market thinking the noise of others talking might drown out important words.

She listens while she sings and Echo remembers. 

Today it’s raining, harder to listen, and her heartbeat is keeping time with the quick pitter-patter of the rain because she’s listening through the white noise to two women talking quietly tucked out of the way gazing through the windows of a closed clothing store Echo’s taken shelter in the entry of. The hot tropical mist leaves haloes and mist, and Echo is not singing today, simply tucked up in a corner with her skirts and scarf pulled down to shield her skin. 

They speak softly, but she can make out their voices if she strains. 

“They’re re-asserting Astarum rule here,” one says.

“Of course they are, after something so big’s gone missing.” 

“They say this planet was the first you know.”

“Those are just stories, but there’s something in the bloodlines, that’s always been public.”

“Everknel and Taivelt.” 

“The last Taivelts went missing ages ago.” 

“They didn’t.” 

“What do you mean they didn’t?” 

“The Astarum has them, all of them.” 

“Why would they want them?”

“Because there’s something in the bloodlines. You just said it.”

“I wonder what it is.” 

“Some sort of knowledge, I reckon. Some sort of family secret.” 

“If it’s a secret, the Astarum’s already got it.” 

“I don’t think so, not with the way they’re looking for the Everknel boy.” 

“Kasvak vak, Aludra, I swear, with the conspiracy theories.”

“My husband is on the council, you know as well as I that none of these are theories. They’re scared of what it means that he’s no longer here. The Everknels place on Cavan made this a stable place the Astarum couldn’t touch without repercussions from other protective agencies.” 

“What happens now then?” 

“That’s the scary part; we don’t know.” 

* * *

When Mahyar hears they’ve received orders to retrieve Liana something vaguely like relief washes over him. He’s spent a long time training himself not to feel the emotions he was programmed to feel; to go against his design. He is, like Selah, a type of technological product of Hyacinth Industries referred to as an Emotionally Latent Artificial Specimen, colloquially called by many galaxy-goers a ‘Cynth’ or an ‘Ella’. He’s a later model than Selah, harder to tell from a human, no visible joints, and all manufactured beautiful features he likes to obscure with makeup designed to make him invisible to other machines. He’s only two. But he’s seen more than enough hellish things in this galaxy for two years. He was not created to be as good at combat as he is, but the programming was easy to have rewritten.

He became a new man when he escaped his former slaver, had himself rewritten from the inside out. And Liana Doste became a key player when she suggested the undertaking offhand on a small moon controlled by Pink Branch Starship Guild goons. 

He owes his life to them, but only Liana Doste still remains somewhere within the realm of affection Mahyar still feels. Some part of him is excited to see her. This part becomes twofold when they touch down on Pasmore, a planet which seems still in a hushed quiet, waiting for an invasion which may never come. 

Something in his chest near-bursts when he sees her, laughter lines and messy bun decorated with fake flowers and the clothing of a weary traveller, she comes out to meet them with something he finds familiar on her; an air of displeasure and anger contained only delicately by a calm exterior. 

“You let Scope take my ship,” is the first thing out of her mouth, not to Mahyar but to Cliptic, who flinches, because she knows that she’s in trouble. 

“I thought it was safer to make two missions at once rather than back to back so as to not risk Devon’s life further,” Cliptic says, quickly, sharply as though she’s trying to convince herself still. 

“I had no part in it,” Mahyar says. Liana glares at him in a way that says she most definitely does not need his input.

“I don’t care what you thought was wise, you had orders, you know how important orders are, you know that not following them will get you killed, where did they go? They’re going to get themselves killed, Cliptic!” Her voice waivers between worry, fear, and anger. 

“And Devon might be dead already,” Cliptic responds, quiet.

“Exactly! You’re risking half my crew for one man!” There’s distress in her voice now, more than anger.

“Isn’t that what you would have done?” Cliptic asks, her voice near a whisper. 

Liana stares at her, and shakes her head. 

“We’re going to tail them,” she says through her teeth.

* * *

The Aasvogel has holdings all over the galaxy, but the station they keep political prisoners in their custody on is in Sector G, far from the Cacophony and closer into the galactic core, tucked inside a nest of stars still in their infancy. It takes a day and a half to get there, and in that time Virgo spends an increasing number of hours in Scope’s room when he takes breaks, listening to developing news about contact with an extraterrestrial race, watching galaxies be born inside his eyes every time he gets a new piece of information, and stealing small chaste kisses between breathlessly passionate sentences about the universe around them and trying to do good.

Virgo finds himself falling in love in the moments in between time, forgetting what exactly makes him do so, and when they reach that small star nursery there’s something else inside his chest that he never felt following bar patrons home after long nights drinking. There’s a newfound tie to the junked century-old starship. He begins to try to see it from the eyes of a man who fell in love with piloting it.

He begins exploring the ship, and when they draw close to what may very well be their demise, that’s what he’s doing, with Dane beside him, pouring over a letter found in the mostly-unused over-wing storage area above the left wing. The matching area on the right, Devon converted into a bedroom ages ago, but this one has parts left untouched from their original salvage, and the letter they found there. 

It details the love faded from a man to his ex-wife, this ship a gift to her, his magnum opus of technological design, originally christened “Proof That I Loved You”, she only flew once before Scope, Liana, and Cliptic used her to escape the worst mission they’d ever been sent on. 

There’s something about the haunting sadness of something fading, something dying, that rings true with a slowly perishing humanity around Virgo, and makes something about the feeling for Scope growing in his chest become keenly sharp against his ribs, like it’s half political statement, half treason against the failure of a crumbling human galaxy. 

Dane is as enchanted. Neither of them expects the turbulence from atmosphere, and they both jump back from the letter when they realize how long they’ve been pouring through boxes and compartments of things that time forgot.

“Guess it’s time to meet the maker then, huh?” Dane breathes, something nervous touching his usually-kind-and-relaxed face. Virgo examines Dane as he feels he ground underneath them shift as they begin their descent into landing. There’s toughness behind the weathered face and soft smiles, but not the kind of toughness Scope or Liana has, he wonders distantly if Dane ever fought in a war but something about the soft set of his jaw and the way his hands move without urgency most of the time says he hasn’t.

“The maker?” Virgo asks, finally, going back to neatly returning the docking registrations and vehicle makers’ paperwork to a huge file cabinet on one wall.

“Turn of phrase, just another way to say ‘creation deity’.” 

“The spirit which created everything,” Virgo says, and Dane nods.

“What do you believe in, Dane?” Virgo asks.

Dane looks half-surprised by the question, breath falling into a chuckle. He straightens up to look at Virgo, hands on his hips.

“You know, that’s one damn hard question to answer, fledge,” he says, “I’ve believed a lot of things in my life, and what didn’t turn out to be false turned out to be real. There’s not a lot of wiggle room for fancy deities in that. But I’ve got faith, in something. Maybe it’s just in the dark matter.”

Virgo’s brows furrow in thought, confusion.

“What do you mean ‘in the dark matter’?” he asks as Dane begins leading the way down the winding staircase back to the main portion of Precarious’ structure. The over-wing storage compartments are hard to get to, their entrances hidden behind removable panels in the cargo hold, and the narrow staircases leading to those hidden entrances are so tight and bright and unusual to the architecture of Precarious that it seems like they exist within a different dimension. 

“Maybe I’ve been around Scope saying there’s somethin but he doesn’t know what out there for too long but I feel like there’s something vaguely religious in negative space. There’s a reason matter doesn’t fill it.” 

“Dark matter is proof of divine planning to you?” 

“In a lot of ways, yes,” Dane says, leaning against the panel he slides closed over the hidden door. 

“I think the randomness of it is religious,” Scope adds in from the doorway from Precarious’ main levels. He leads the small group to the gun rack and once again outfits Virgo with a pair of small pistols which he needs less help with this time. Dane is given the long-range rifle, and Scope takes the strange gun that he recovered from Mahyar’s house after they were chased, as well as a small strange plasmid gun which Virgo’s only seen a handful of in his lifetime. An uncomfortable silence falls over the three of them as they steel themselves for what comes next. 

They open the cargo hold to what seems to be a receiving bay for the station, Precarious’ nose pointed out clear airtight doors which drop off into open space filled with light from a dozen closeby stars. A band of asteroids around one of the more distant ones catches the light from its sibling stars and the ice twinkles in space like a million tiny stars in their own right. Virgo wishes he had time to intake the beauty, but there isn’t time to prepare, they’re already going, and Scope’s leading them crouched and stealthy down an interior hallway from the receiving dock. 

He’s talking quietly into the comm box at his wrist, quick and too soft for Virgo to make out the words, but a staticky voice is responding in time and Scope seems to know what he’s doing at least once the commbox tells him what he’s doing.

He turns around to give both Dane and Virgo the hushed order of ‘quiet!’ when Dane’s boot scuffs on the metal floor and shrieks, half-scaring all of them out of their skins.

Virgo’s blood pumps like ice on fire at the edges, static and almost vibrating with anxiety, he feels his palms go clammy as they creep deeper and deeper into sets of identical metal halls lined with commboxes and doors to what seem to be offices and living spaces for staff and not prisoners. 

It takes half an hour of creeping to get to the huge circular center of the station, where prisoners are kept. The entire time, Virgo can’t catch a full breath, and feels anxiety pooling in the palms of his hands and the pit of his stomach. Every muscle in his body is held tight and still. Scope looks to be holding himself the same way, but Dane seems at this moment incapable of fear or anxiety, and walks although tighter in on himself not much quieter or more hemmed in than normal. He is alert, though, his eyes constantly cast back behind them in between moments. 

The prison itself spans near six stories, all of them open onto the center rotunda acting as a vague ‘prison yard’ of sorts. Sun and starlight beats down through the translucent center of the dome, and the inside feels something between an oven and a swamp, the smell of human sweat and other fluids hanging still in the air as they enter onto the top floor, the only one not holding cells, a walk of sorts, and they come face to face with a single guard patrolling the large circular walkway. 

“Hey, uh,” Scope says, immediately dropping the stealthy crouch to attempt to seem nonchalant, “I heard that visitation hours were, like, now?” 

The guard, a light skinned man with red hair and a spattering of freckles not nearly to rival Virgo’s, looks blankly appalled, confusion working its way through his features.

“You need to check in with the docking professional and get your badges, and there isn’t any visit--” Dane shakes his head, stepping forward from behind Virgo and Scope and ramming the end of his rifle against the guard’s skull. The guard crumples to his knees and then to the floor, eyes slipping mostly-closed.

“We can’t talk our way out of this one, Scope,” Dane mutters gruffly, with a sigh, as there’s a yell from underneath them and a few of the prisoners standing in the round courtyard underneath them are looking up, yelling something, and although Virgo can’t make out the words he’s pretty certain it sounds like cheering. Which, in a prison full of interstellar criminals, Virgo assumes can only go so well.

To the entire group’s surprise the alarm doesn’t sound then, while the prisoners gather underneath them, chanting something, urging them on. So under the cloak of the noise cascading inside the poorly ventilated and echoing chamber, they descend the staircase set into the walk and come down onto a similar walkway, but this level holds cells. At least a hundred on just this floor, two hundred maybe. 

“We’re never going to find him,” Virgo murmurs, while a few prisoners quietly watch them from cells, but look away when they realize they’re being watched. 

“He’ll be on this floor,” Scope says, quietly, urgently, “This one’s for the Aasvogel’s real bad prisoners.” 

“What did Devon do anyway?” Virgo whispers.

“Later,” mutters Scope, casting a quick glance to every cell’s identification plaque to one side. The cheering is dying down, now, and a strange quiet, a waiting lack of presence has replaced it. Then there are footsteps above them, and they stop where they find the guard out cold. Then the alarm sounds, an otherworldly droning unlike anything Virgo has heard, it wails through the space and reverberates off the walls like a battle cry or a religious chant, and strikes Virgo’s blood ice cold. The three of them freeze, looking at one another, and then Scope shakes his head. 

“We’re doing what we came here to do,” he growls, and sets off. They stalk across the upper walk more than halfway before Scope stops dead in front of an empty cell. The identification placard next to the cell reads “Annalise Arabak, 28 years old, #91227”

Scope sighs. 

“Alright, plan B,” he mutters, and he says something swiftly into the commbox about ‘medical examination rooms’ and ‘tracking chips’ and the voice on the other line pauses for a very long moment before giving a quick staticky parcel of information.

Scope leads them out from the circle again, quickly, as they hear two or three sets of footsteps coming down the stairs, out a hallway from the sixth floor, and down a long hallway half-running, keeping glancing back at Dane and Virgo to make sure they’re on his heel. They stay on his heel, nervous. 

“What’s plan B?” Dane asks, hushed, into Scope’s ear as they round a corner.

“I don’t know,” Scope growls, “But we’re going to find out.”

* * *

Ira didn’t expect them to do this; he didn’t expect Precarious’ crew to splinter and split. He’s been watching the little ship that carries something stolen, something big in its engine room and in addition someone strong, a Pink Branch hacker who no one would ever suspect of bringing down a galaxy, for as long as he’s been aware of its existence. Them stealing the Initial Expansion plans was risky, but nothing compared to the first risk they took with that ship and the thing embedded in its engine. And Ira has always found risk an interesting thing to watch other people take. 

Especially when that risk is usually for good things. Like freeing slaves or bringing down governments he doesn’t agree with.

The tattoos, curving dark arches and in the same blue ink as the ones over his lips and chin, across his hands and arms tremble under the light of the flickering computer-commbox set up he has in his underwater room of Sanura’s boat-house.

He’s anxious he might be losing something he started to care about without realizing he cared. This ship (and Devon himself) is a hook to hang some hope for the galaxy on, and now that it’s looking more and more like there’s no way out of this alive, Precarious’ longevity is threatened. He keeps talking to Scope through the relay Solomon set up between them, quietly, trying to keep calm, trying to keep all the information in front of him but he knows that this won’t last long. He’s doing what he can but as the rockslide tumbles down the mountain gathering steam it feels like there’s not going to be any chance of escaping it.

Scope is reckless and self-centered, he keeps finding himself thinking to himself as he tries to save the same man he’s growing increasingly furious at for throwing away his own life and the ship which might damn well bring maps to the Saints, or free enough slaves from the Astarum to make at least some of a difference. 

He’s bargaining the Precarious Escape’s potential against the life of one member and while Ira would have sent them off to save Devon he would have waited until they had a standing crew with combat experience and a good escape plan. Flying on nothing was a stupid idea and as he listens to Scope muttering through them trying to find Devon anywhere on that massive base, he’s seeing the light at the far end of the tunnel close.

Scope’s dug that crew into a hole a mile deep and a foot wide and they’re looking back up at starlight that’s about to burn out because as Ira works to find the tracking information on Devon, he can see Solomon’s message in the corner of the screen, a tiny line of text reading nothing more than ‘the race was sabotaged”. This means he only has a few more moments, the relay’s been found by some higher-standing government official in one of the three regions its’ being passed through and they’re working to take it down. At the very least the connection isn't secure anymore and Ira’s almost glad when it cuts out so he doesn’t have to listen to Scope trying not to panic and he doesn’t have to worry about who’s watching anymore. But then the fear of the unknown sets in and he has to sit in silence staring out the window at the waves lapping overhead without word or update from the other side of the galaxy where it seems like Pink Branch’s hope is about to burn itself out.

Ira goes upstairs to find Sanura stamping a hundred copies of the same letter at the dining room table, a low-slung affair it’s easier to sit on the ground than a chair to get to. 

“Sending out the bad news?” he asks, crossing to make himself a cup of hot chocolate. He tries not to think about what’s happening right now. 

“I’m trying to break it quietly,” she says, “This is not going to go over well with the Saints’ Council.”

“What? A candle getting knocked over?” Ira asks, getting lost in the metal scrape of the spoon against the cup. It pulls him further away from reality again. He imagines empty prison hallways, he imagines blood. 

“Yes,” she says, something sad in her voice, “This has not happened in a very long time.” 

Ira nods.

“It’s a bad sign?”

“There is no hope or good luck in the stars for the Saints for the next few revolutions.” 

Ira nods, trying to bite his tongue about how it seems like there’s no hope or good luck in the stars for the entire galaxy these days, and stays quiet. Trying to be comforting without disregarding the things in his own head. 

“I think we’re due for a cycle of bad luck, we have been blessed for too long,” Sanura murmurs, dark fingers working over the paper, folding it under them and pushing it away. 

“Maybe you’re right,” Ira sighs, “Maybe we just have to deal with the bad and good will come after.” 

“I feel like that’s such a flimsy thing to hold onto,” says Sanura, something tired and small in her voice. 

“So is a candle,” Ira points out, and the silence sits between them as she thinks about it.

* * *

A hand claps around Virgo’s mouth before he screams when they’ve found the room Devon is in, Scope’s shh-shh-shh in his ear somewhere between comforting and insistent. Before them is a room that smells worse than the prison’s main froom, six hundred feet long and two hundred wide and occupied by some dozen prisoners in varying states of torture and decay. The dozen not counting half a dozen more already almost-certainly dead on the floor or still-tied to crucifiction-like posts, hung upside down or in pieces. 

The room probably used to be white, but the stains on the walls are everything from fecal matter to blood to what looks like something Virgo would rather not identify. Virgo stands still, at the entrance to the room, trying not to cry or vomit and feeling both urging upward in his throat. Scope holds onto his hand when he drops his own from Virgo’s mouth. He rubs comforting circles with his thumb where Virgo’s meets his hand.

“Go switch with Dane,” he murmurs, pointing back to Dane standing guard at the door. Virgo shakes his head. And Scope doesn’t seem up to argue this right now, so he nods, but doesn’t let go of Virgo’s hand. Virgo still feels like screaming every time he looks up from his shoes. At least the square foot of blood and other things around his feet is nothing in comparison to the half-comatose prisoners left here. The lights are too bright and show too much of the way their bodies have been bent and broken and the way their eyes don’t even follow Scope and Virgo as they make their way across the room. 

There Devon is, in the far corner, his clothing not changed from when they left Pasmore but torn now, sticky with blood and darkened near each tear. His hair falls over his face, but it's not hard to see how much is missing. He, like the others, makes no motion to look up or show any sign of being aware of Scope and Virgo’s presence. Maybe it’s easier that way. Scope lets go of Virgo’s hand, kneeling before Devon, it’s easier to see as Devon turns half-defensive, half-catatonic, the way his wrists are connected by a length of short steel cable to his ankles, and the steel itself is spattered brown and red, stained and wiped near the place where it cuts into flesh. 

Virgo doesn’t want to look. He tears his eyes away and stares at the wall. He can hear Scope saying something, but Devon doesn’t respond and Virgo’s already starting to feel so numb everything is six feet of corrugated concrete away. 

Scope keeps talking, as he takes one gun from his belt, fiddles with a few dials on the end where the gun should be loaded, and snaps the cord between Devon’s wrists and ankles with a loud pop and the bar of heat that forms at the tip of the gun. 

Virgo jumps at the sound, and beneath him he can hear a faint whimper from Devon. Then Scope is scooping Devon up into his arms, the man’s tiny frame tucking weakly against Scope’s chest, scared and trembling but not struggling to be freed.

They make a quick escape and Virgo tries not to think about the eleven sets of eyes that watch them leave with one man, one man who could have been any of them but wasn’t. He wonders how long they’ll sit in that room before they die. Or if they’ll give up the secrets they were put there for. He wonders if Devon did, what secrets Devon has to have tortured out of him, and which stayed quiet. Everything in Virgo’s brain is quickly becoming a tangle of words and thoughts that have no end goal or end game and their escape is stopped abruptly by a group of guards that Virgo doesn’t expect but can’t handle right now and suddenly he has two pistols in his hands and he doesn’t care if he hits or not but fuck if he’s not shooting, because he’s seen enough and he’s had enough today and before anyone can speak there are two dead guards on the floor and Dane has his rifle fixed on the other three. One looks them dead in the eyes and laughs, unsheathing his own gun. Before he can pull it fully from his holster, Virgo puts two rounds through his chest, a cold, precise fury slowly dripping into every corner of his veins. Anyone who let that room happen deserves to die, his brain keeps repeating, anyone who knew or let that happen is disgusting, fear courses through after it, fear and anger and anxiety, but it’s the rage that makes decisions now.

He keeps his gun on the remaining two guards standing, hears a drip hit the floor, Devon’s blood splashing against metal flooring to his left, and he feels his finger bearing down on the trigger when one nervously drops his gun in front of him and raises his hands above his head.

“We’ll let you go,” he says, and Virgo can see liquid soaking down his thighs. Virgo hears the laugh catch in his throat before he knows it’s happening, and it comes out somewhere between a laugh and a sob, but he’s shaking his head.

“Go,” Dane booms, and the two men scatter, Virgo’s guns clatter on the cement floor and he’s down to his knees but Dane isn’t having that. He doesn’t get picked up nicely and gently like Devon did, he gets slung over Dane’s shoulder as they rush for the door to the docking platforms.

They’re back inside Precarious by the time staff comes to check the docking platforms, and have pushed out far past the Aasvogel base’s reach by the time that the base starts trying to track their movements. Dane is sent to the engine room as soon as they’re inside, and Virgo waits with Devon in the medbay while Scope gets them out as quick as possible. 

He tries not to look at the near-half of Devon’s face that’s just… missing. He tries not to think about how the hell Devon’s still alive. Instead he just sits quiet, mumbling whatever small reassuring things he can think of. 

He curses a lack of medical knowledge as his hands shake and he bites his lip. He wishes Scope had sent him to the engine room instead, he wishes Devon would say something, prove that he’s alive beyond a shallow rise and fall against the ribcage and a faint gurgling sound. 

Virgo stares at the blank metal just beyond Devon for a long, long time.  Something about the silence feels revolting.

  
  



End file.
